If I was going to be interviewed about blogging by The Geek Anthropologist: 15 questions

 

(… this is very informal…)

Why do I blog?

When you work outside academia and you’re not actively researching you still want to write, you still want to talk to anthropologists and share something of yourself, your experiences and your insights.  I like blogging because I can write about everyday practices, ‘fun’ blogging and also comment seriously on what’s happening in my workplace.  Of late I like writing about how I fit into an interdisciplinary space.

 

How does my blogging contribute to the production and dissemination of anthropological knowledge?

Well, in writing about everyday issues I bring an anthropological perspective to new audiences, especially when I write about buying second hand clothes, or women in the workplace, or participating in Enjo parties.  I like to think broadly and around everyday practices and I also like to see what they look like from an anthropological perspective.  In saying that though, I still hope to appeal to an anthropological audience, an audience who understand and appreciate the take that I have on viewing and participating in the world.  So that’s how I see how my blogging adds to the body of anthropological work.  It’s a bit like seed funding, so let’s see what it looks like and then decide whether we can grow it.

 

Does my blogging about anthropology affect anthropological practice?

Well, that’s hard to say and hard to know about.  Anthropological practice has some core praxes but these occur in such diverse contexts it’s sometimes really hard to have an anthropological sensibility about it all.  We’re so spread out among sub-disciplinary knowledge and praxis, among geographical, specialty – even virtual areas – and even spread between the arts and sciences, so who really knows?  If blogging is about sharing an anthropologically inspired viewpoint on an issue, on a practice, on something that involves people who are working on some project together, then yes, I do think that what I write about affects our practice.  I can show people both outside of and within the academy something about how I think and work, and hey, if you’re getting more than 10,000 hits for a blog, you must be making people think about something that they’re doing…

 

Who reads my anthropology blog?

Well, I really hope that anthropologists read it.  And those interested in anthropology.  But WordPress lets you tag your posts so you can use this to reach broader audiences, which is really important if you’re wanting to show that you’re ‘thinking outside the box’, and this is important for some audiences, not necessarily anthropologists, but other audiences who are looking to break with standard practices, standard ways of thinking about how people work together, how they provide services and how they move materials, services, people and objects around the globe.  But the analytics that come with the host site don’t necessarily tell you exactly where people come from, only what city and country.  You really have to guess at the rest.

 

Who is my target audience?

Well, if I had my preference I would want to write for an anthropological audience firstly, and because I have an interest in interdisciplinarity I also try to write for a broader, educated audience.  I can’t be too specific about my exact area of expertise and enterprise because I’d probably get the sack from work if they figured out that I was writing about work, work practices and work issues without official permission.  But that said, my target audience is both anthros and non-anthros.  It really depends on the post, on the topic and the issues though.  These change and this affects the audience.  One of the most pleasant experiences that I had recently was when other anthro blog sites picked up my posts, shared links and commented on them.  That’s blogging peer review as far as I’m concerned!

 

How do I separate out the personal from the professional?

Well, my first response to this question would be: do you have to?  If we write from a situated standpoint, a situated space and perspective, then the line between personal and professional becomes blurred doesn’t it?  Look at what’s happened since Writing Culture; we’re in every page we write, aren’t we?  And in the blogosphere, we aren’t restricted so much by the rules around writing that exist in publishing, in academic texts, in conference presentations and colloquia, are we?  This is a freer form that is still becoming, that isn’t set in concrete yet and never can be simply by definition.  So I don’t need to separate myself out from my work, from my perspective, from my comments and insights.  However, I don’t blog about my homelife, my family or my friends (if I can help it).

 

How do I know when I’ve been successful in blogging? 

This is hard to know about too.  If you pay attention to the bloggers, the big bloggers then you’re always going to feel like a failure.  They have hits in the millions.  Me?  I’m lucky to get into five figures occasionally.  I know that there are emerging rock star anthropologists and I believe that they serve a role in getting the anthropological message out there.  We need all sorts of writers, all sorts of anthropological practitioners, all sorts of social analysis going on so I’m not going to criticise anyone for their success outside of the academy.  If anything, I’m all for it.  We all get dragged up this way, all get caught in the upflow.

 

Does success matter?

Well, we all write for an audience so success is relative.  If you develop a readership, then you’re successful.  If no one reads what you write, you’re writing garbage.  I have garbage posts that hardly anyone has read.  I should dump these now.  If they’ve been sitting on the website for nearly a year and no one’s read them, then they’re not successful.  So it does matter.  Having said that, there are some excellent cooperative, academic anthropological blogs that mimic the production of texts in standard publishing, but are available on the web.  Peer review, calls for papers, high end production – and then you have the single bloggers like me, who are sometimes hard pressed to keep coming up with content.  This is a production issue for anyone publishing anything.  It’s not new here.

 

Is it all about the stats? 

Well, we naturally tend towards wanting to find out how much, how many, how often and then to doing some number crunching to make ‘sense’ out the data…. Even if you’re not particularly inclined towards number crunching, the medium – like much of social media – really lends itself to number crunching, so you can’t help yourself.  There are sites that can help you though…

 

But there aren’t always a lot of likes or comments, so how do I know if my blog is having any effect anywhere?

This is true.  While some blogs may have thousands of hits which translate as reads/downloads/views, you don’t always get a translation into discourse, into comments, or even into likes.  Occasionally people will comment, or even like a post, but that’s not often the case.  And I’ve noticed this with larger anthropological blogging sites too.  The issue for me here is: what do people really make of what’s written here?  How do they read/consume what’s said?  Who do they talk to about the content?  Who do they pass the blogs on to?  I find that you get people wanting to comment who are typically mildly upset about what’s said, or seeking further clarification, evidence, or research into assertions that may be made.  But overall, there’s little interaction, which is a shame.

 

Why don’t I use references? 

I have a crisis of legitimacy occasionally and insert references, even though other bloggers tell me I don’t need them.  You don’t need them in this format, but it depends on the blog post and the audience.  If you anticipate that your work may be taken up and translated (this has happened), or posted on a Learning Management System for a course (this too has happened), or disseminated on other anthropological websites that have an academic turn, then, as is the custom and the norm, we too as anthropological bloggers follow this norm.  If I’m not quoting anything knowingly, I won’t bother using references and my preference is for opinion pieces that don’t necessarily rely on the interpretation and translation of bodies of knowledge.  I save that kind of writing for academic discourse within the pages of academic journals.  To my way of thinking, you write for a specific audience, and in blogging I don’t think that everyone’s looking for reference materials.  By all means publish your essays online, and these will include references.  And after all, why demonise references?  References are an acknowledgement of your joining in conversations that have already occurred as you position your own views against these voices.  Always better to acknowledge them and join in.

 

Am I just writing for other anthropology bloggers, and even if I am, is that such a bad thing?

I write for anyone that happens to land on my blog from a search engine, or has happily signed up to receive updates from my website.  If its other bloggers, then that’s great too.  I read their blogs with great interest as bloggers often get opinion pieces out there long before academic articles have even hit peer review.  I support both old forms of writing in academic presses, especially when I manage to get an article in print, as well as new forms of publication through weblogs.  The evolving medium, it’s growing acceptance and the democratisation that blogging allows I watch with relish and interest.  Like all processes, the wheat will be sorted from the chaff…

 

Why am I hiding my identity behind a pseudonym? 

A workplace Code of Conduct prevents me from revealing my identity.  Writing behind a pseudonym is an old and valued practice that has allowed voices that would not otherwise be heard a platform to publish their views.  I see that writing as the Anxious Anthropologist allows me to participate in the same freedoms, paradoxically because of restrictions to publicising my voice, that my writerly ancestors had to contend with.  Elsewhere I use my name and identify myself as coming from a particular space and place, a discipline, a specialty, even a sub-speciality.  But there is a challenge in writing like this that takes you out of your comfort zone, out of the familiar terminology, the same arguments and the usual webs of significance that you weave around your worlds.  And this is fun.

 

Wouldn’t it be better to blog honestly? 

I would love to write under my own name, but as with many things to do so means that you have to be brave, knowledgeable and up to the personal critique that attaches to so many in the blogosphere.  It’s sometimes easier, and more freeing to write as I do.  And that doesn’t mean that I write dishonestly.  Anthropological endeavours can sometimes have the tendency of reporting back, reporting on and reporting about that shares something with the tools of the subterfuge.  Who hasn’t left the tape recorder run on sometimes without consent?  I’ve heard that this happens…

 

Where do I see blogs and blogging in future? 

I see that anthropological blogging, like blogging in many professional endeavours will become the norm, rather than the unusual.  Progressing through courses, moving into postgraduate studies and then into research and/or work will in future include the production of knowledge within spaces not evident now, in group blogs, personal blogs and workplace blogs.  We will all curate our knowledges in this way and make them available to anyone interested in our views, our analyses and our growing bodies of knowledge and practice.  I can’t imagine what blogs will look like, but it is such an accessible, powerful medium for communicating and sharing, I just know that it’s not if we should, but when we will.

Acknowledgements (and respect to): https://thegeekanthropologist.com/

 

 

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 article! An article!

If there’s one thing that helps to ground you when you’ve felt voiceless or powerless in the past, it’s when you see the writing equivalent of your name up in lights, that is to say, in print, as a solo author in a peer-reviewed professional journal article. That is about to happen – just give it days and I CAN’T WAIT. This is not skiting, as immersion within the process of imagining, thinking, articulating, writing, editing and preparing your thoughts on a topic and submitting this for peer review (and resubmitting or even ignoring for a long time and then resubmitting) is a whole thing in itself. I feel reborn as a gen-you-ine author.

But as we all know, the anticipation of a thing, it’s near reality, the near-completion, the not-quite-there- yet is more important than the actual publication itself. While it is still a potential, it is powerful because it has not yet come to be, has not yet come to be known. Those ideas, put together and uniquely fashioned by me in my own way with my own references and turn of phrase have not yet been picked up, consumed, digested, regurgitated and spat out yet. It’s still in the future, even though it’s the imminent future. And while it is still becoming, it (the article) and me (it’s author/mother/father) also reside in the zone of potentiality. I can’t be dated by my last work because it’s still a work in progress and hasn’t come to be. Beautiful logic, isn’t it?

This reminds me of the difficulty faced by researchers in gaining grant monies. No sooner do they apply for and receive monies, there is no time between this event and the anxiety riven process of putting together the next application. There is no time to rest on your laurels, to be known for the last piece of research published and it is clear to me that the anticipation and expectation is better than the event itself. It’s all downhill afterwards… Academia is really about what’s coming, rather than what is.

But more than this, it’s not just me and my voice alone in the article. When I talk about having a successful journal article publication I’m joining in the stream of conversation about the topic that I wrote about. I’ve drawn in the great words of like-minded and opposite-minded thinkers to position myself within the tensions of these opposing arguments. I’ve had to take a position myself and position myself I certainly did. This is challenging, because you have to align yourself one way or the other. No fence sitting. You take a position and align yourself with like-minded authors who’ve been there before. That’s one way of writing.

There are other ways too, but the important point is that I’ve joined the conversation. I’ve made my observations and put forward my contribution. I’ve drawn on the expertise of those who came before me, but I’ve put my thoughts together to say something and it seems to be of merit. I’m not voiceless anymore, or just banging on about something and getting sick of hearing my own voice. I’ve taken the next step, and it started at least a year and a half ago, even though it’s coming to fruition now. So, what are you waiting for? Dust off those manuscripts sitting in the drawer, locate those rejection slips and get editing.

 

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.

 

Reading fiction as therapy

Recently I found a website that offers fiction as therapy. You have a consultation of sorts and they send you away with a list of novels to read over the next twelve months. The problems sound like the concerns of everyday life, not serious psychiatric disturbance and the list given to people to read sounds like a prescription of sorts, specifically for you to heal yourself through reading a list of novels, selected specially for you.

Having just rediscovered fiction after almost a lifetime of hardly reading any at all, I now wonder about the idea of fiction as therapy and think that this idea needs to be interrogated. What goes on? What is read? What is the psychic shift that occurs – or that the prescriber hopes will occur – in the reader? Does everyone get the message, get affected in the same way by the same works? Do classics work better than other forms of writing? Does your age make a difference? And more of course…

As I work my way through ‘Missus’, a classic of Australian fiction written by Ruth Park sometime in the 1950’s about the characters who will feature in her later classic, ‘The Harp in the South’ I cringe painfully as I start to recognise character traits in myself, in people I know, in people I live and work with including members of my own family. I recognise modern versions of the same dilemmas faced by the characters in the novel and wonder how I would resolve them in my own life. You always balk at the reality of insight as it hits you and it is this realisation that I have come to about fiction.

Fiction gives us the opportunity to share in the stories of our own times, in the taken for granted understandings and insights about the human condition. Novels may be thinly veiled fact, or completely imagined, but the characters, situations and tensions are all drawn from something in real life. Everything’s a story one way or another and in reading fiction we all seek to get to the point of the work, and there is always a point, a message, a reason for the storyteller to put pen to paper in the first place. This is the novel that we all have inside us, the tale that we all wish to tell.

I am not a scholar of fiction, literary or otherwise and can only offer opinions on having rediscovered both being a writer and a reader. My writing takes the form of everyday administrative rubbish, occasional scholarly work and more regular blogs while the reading now takes the form of a delicious immersion in fiction.

I feel like I have rediscovered a secret world, an open secret held by everyone but me, a world of tales unique and common, imagined and real populated with characters who I both love and hate, easily identify with and ponder the reasons why some author bothered to characterise, draw and write about some of them at all. And some of the people I’ve read about, well, there are characters that I really dislike. I’ve been reading and writing non-fiction for so long, I have wondered what the point of fiction was? Ridiculous really for someone whose bread and butter is people’s stories of everyday life…

So if the point of therapy is to cure, and novels are being recast as therapeutic tools, then what is happening when people read in a curative fashion? Are novels taking the place of elders in the community? Are they taking the place of the lessons we learn from parents, friends and others in our social worlds? Are they providing the ah ha experience that is lacking in our friendships, in our social relationships? Are they replacing the GP, other people within society in whom we put our trust, share our fears and seek guidance from?

So let’s get back to the real and away from the conjecturing – what have I learned since I returned to the novel?

I’m finding out about women, about the conditions of life that we have lived in and continue to live in. A feminist autobiography rather than a novel really, but it rekindled and reaffirmed my belief in feminism and reminded me of the real challenges that women continue to face.

I’m finding out about the stories that circulate about parenting. Reading fiction about families has taught me about what some of the taken for granted understandings are that parents across generations, across ethnicities and across time have shared. Not all children are perfect and so too, neither are parents. And we all have varieties of children, and these tales too have already been told.

There used to be more privacy and respect for privacy too. Sharing on the scale that we encounter in the modern day just never existed. People had private lives, private thoughts, private desires and others didn’t necessarily participate in these the way we all do now in our voyeuristic and observing societies in which nothing cannot be written in response to ‘how are you feeling now?’

I’ve learned about relationships, about the kinds of things we strive for, about self-disclosure within relationships, about needs, both met and unmet and about the different ways that people come together through varied circumstances. I try to fit my own narrative in there somewhere too…

Intangible elements such as the joy of following one’s nose, following one’s passion and becoming a leader in your field despite obstacles get portrayed in fiction. I love this and find it inspiring. We all need to be inspired and find this through different ways in our lives.

There are stories to guide you in your quest for self-improvement and enlightenment (help me please, I can’t stand some of this), but it does teach you something about your own limits as well. Do I put down a story I’m hating by page 33, or do I persevere? Is this a metaphor for my bad relationships too? Should I just learn to let go earlier? But, like in relationships, there’s always something that just keeps you on the page…

I’m finding that I’m drawn more and more to biographies, even to autobiographies, which if you’re writing these mid-life are really a form of memoir. While claiming to be factual, they can only ever be a perspective, even if it’s your own perspective on your own life. Everything is contextual, isn’t it? How do people account for themselves? How do people account for the horrors of their upbringing? How do they account for the marvellous circumstances in which they found themselves? Or how do they account for the striving in their lives that brought them to the place in which they can sit and reflect now? I love people’s stories.

So can fiction help you? I think that it can, in that fiction exposes you to characters, situations, dilemmas, the possible and the impossible and shows you how someone else has conceptualised a dilemma, a person, a situation, a feeling and how they’ve dealt with this. In doing so, fiction can help us know more of the world in ways that we hadn’t accounted for, and that brings a richness into our own lives and the way we live and share our lives.

So am I ill for needing fiction? Am I cured through reading fiction? Both and neither at the same time. It really depends on your perspective… I’m loathe to succumb to the further medicalisation of everyday life, but perhaps the reading of fiction allows us the opportunity in much the same way that tales always have of fixing that within us that needs mending through the knowing and knowledgeable words of others.

Happy reading!

On not renovating

Are we happy with our habitats? It seems like every time I turn on the TV, read a newspaper or even get the mail out of the letter box I’m accosted by beautiful images of luxurious interiors, perfectly lit exteriors or before and after shots of living spaces that hold the promise of a better life for me too, if only I’d embrace the dream. Someone looked at the fireplace at my last house and said, “Gee that would come up really well if you replaced/re tiled/refurbished/updated/polished it” I looked at my fireplace, with its carpet covered concrete at the front, loose tiles and wobbly shelf and thought to myself, “If I touch a brick, surely the whole thing will collapse?” Clearly I’m not a renovator. But what are we seeking with the promise of life in a better, a more beautiful, a more up to date house? And is there an end to it?

Visitors come to my home and see the threadbare carpet, the cracked walls and the holes in the deck outside. We have a lovely overgrown vegetable garden too, overgrown with every species of local weed that can be imagined. Many of the visitors have renovated their own homes already. If you have a lot of money (like many things in life) you can throw cash at the house and fix it pretty quickly, in the same way that throwing cash at anything fixes it. Or if you don’t you can take your time, spend your free days working on it yourself and co-opt the help of friends and family to get the job done. People who do this are very dedicated to the completion of the task and have a long view of the effort and costs required to complete the job. Or, like one family I know, you can put together your plans, submit them to your local council, get them approved and then proceed to sell your house because suddenly you found a better one already renovated just the way you like and save yourself a lot of heart ache.

This all raises the question, not so much of how one should live – although this is very much a part of it – but how much one should live with yesterday’s architecture, yesterday’s styling, less fashionable, perhaps outdated and worn houses and their contents. Are we all subject to keeping up with the Jones’s? What if we’re happy enough how we are? What if we see better uses for our money (if we have it) than to spend it updating our abodes?

Renovating costs a lot of money. And if you live in a city with skyrocketing real estate then it’s going to cost you even more money. There is the cost of architects, draughts people, council and state fees for applications, the cost of labour and the cost of building materials. The prices for these are subject to change as typically renovations always seem to run into problems, often associated with the weather…

What can’t be costed in however, is the desire for change to which humans are subject. If change and variability are the basic stuff our lives, then our desire to reshape our houses, refashion our dwellings and remodel our homes comes as no surprise. Change is hard wired into our selves, and even further, it is our diverse response to change and novelty that marks us as human.

Our relation to the things in our lives is moderated by our desire to interact with those things and experience our lives as improved, different and closer to an ideal because of this, and so too is this reflected in our relation to our environs. We need change in our lives as change refreshes us, refreshes our perspective and our relations to things and to each other. We are literally reinvented by novelty. It is not enough to clean the house (which is after all, a form of refashioning), but much better to both clean and re arrange, re shape, re model and thrust ourselves into a changed environment in order to experience ourselves anew.

Gardens, which were once places to run around in, grab some sun and performed a functional as well as recreational aspect have also been made anew.  They are now exemplars of sumptuous landscaping, textures, materials and vistas often reflecting cultural borrowing that create an environment of luxury, of holidays, or of whichever state of mind you care to name: jungle, kids playground, retreat, garden nook, native garden, formal garden, kitchen garden, formal or informal entertainment area, office/library/meditation room with or without decks, parkland, botanical garden, tropical garden or simply backyard. And this too is dependent upon your cultural background.

In Australia we decry those neighbours who want to cut down all the trees in their backtyards, leaving the cityscape as one bereft of greenery. We look on in horror as gardens are removed and tiles put down to mimic the courtyards of back home, the landscapes that are reflected in the garden areas of homes from the Middle East, from Europe, from the UK. Gardens for some are what you put in a big pot outside. For others, its fruit trees in miniature while for others it’s nothing less than roses climbing the front of the house and lavender adorning the drive. We all do this: I remember sitting under Eucalypts in Europe, munching on leaves and thinking of home.

But the garden is one aspect, it’s not really renovation as anyone can meander into a garden and start work on it with a garden tool. But home renovation has a sense of permanence about it that is not seen in spadework in the vege patch. It usually requires concrete, that of the metaphoric and the real kind. Changes are wrought for permanence, to match the temperament, mood and budget of the person seeking to remodel themselves. Aren’t our environments a reflection of ourselves? If a handbag says something about my bodily maintenance then what does my house and garden tell you about me?

People in the street in which I live have recently begun renovations. We’ve witnessed the thinking, planning and submitting. We’ve marvelled at the quickness of demolition, at the slowness to start of the building phase. We’ve had conversations about the progress but declined to inspect the premises that are half what they used to be. And I kind of like the sunshine and sky that come into my kitchen window right now, now that the back of their place has been knocked down.

And much like the renovation shows that entertain me so well on TV, I expect that this renovation will be complete in 60 minutes and that we can all move on to the next phase of our relations.  I can’t really fathom why people want to talk about renovations at length and for so long. After all, it’s just a house. We’re not changing the world. But as humans interacting with and upon our everyday environments, we are changing the world, aren’t we?

The speech wars

I was at a meeting today at work and a guy I work with mansplained me, telling the meeting after I’d finished speaking about a point, “Let me qualify that…” He’s done this to me before, once in front of a company staff meeting where he mansplained me, after contradicting what I’d just said, when in fact what I’d commented upon was a new workplace policy that we were actively moving towards.

And these certainly weren’t the only experiences I’d had of this kind with men in workplaces. His comments made me look foolish, made me appear to not know what I was talking about and were designed to unsettle and challenge me. He recognised that he’d done the wrong thing because he approached me afterwards to apologise and he made a great show of being sorry. However, while the humiliation was public, the apology was private.

Would a woman have gotten away with this? Do we get the opportunity to speak our minds, to contradict others and then privately apologise? Or is this simply a personality difference, a difference of work styles meeting at crisis point?

For the women out there, what do you do when the men in your worlds – work, home and social – take centre stage and want to interpret, qualify, rephrase or simply repeat what you’ve just said? “What she means to say… “ is another form of this. For the men out there, do you find yourself doing this, and if so how do you explain this to yourself?

Thinking that it was just me, I questioned myself, questioned my motives, and questioned the premises of my arguments, opinions, and presentations. Was I wrong? Had I not explained myself clearly? Had I not read the mood at work correctly? Did I not understand the policies? I knew I had because I’d been involved in working parties, meetings and reviewed job descriptions that supported the very things that I was saying.

The issue of gender and language has been in the social press again, with a brief article referring to mansplaining, which reduces women’s language to one of credibility, requiring a man to interpret a woman’s intention and meaning through rephrasing and ‘interpreting’ her speech. The article reprinted from the Huffington Post and commented upon through another website can be read here: http://www.alternet.org/gender/10-words-every-girl-should-learn
It’s a great read and points out the 10 words that all girls should learn and use regularly. Here they are:

“Stop interrupting me.”
“I just said that.”
“No explanation needed.”

But of course, questioning myself was a typically gendered response. Women do that. But maybe only some kinds of women, women who’d been vulnerable at other times in their lives and who were used to questioning themselves because of long-standing insecurities. Other people noticed too though, so I knew it wasn’t just in my mind. And they’d had bad experiences being mansplained too. It’s frustrating and immature and prevents open, honest expression and discussion. I can’t stand being ‘interpreted’ all the time.

I think the article makes a good point about credibility. However this is a product of culture, our acculturation within our own society to conform with the roles and rules of social intercourse. We learn this behaviour through the examples set for us, through the lessons we’ve learned through social interaction and the modelling provided by adults around us as we were growing up. Culture that shapes us in these ways is very hard to break because it’s so ‘normal’. We socialise children to respond ‘appropriately’, often castigating young girls for behaviour that may well be rewarded in young boys, and certainly aspired to in business worlds. The commonalities between successful businessmen and psychopathy are renowned. Even Googling ‘assertive girl’s behaviour’ raises websites that are to do with aggressive behaviour in girls and teens and how to identify and manage this. And this comes up on page one! How can assertiveness be construed so quickly, associated so readily with aggression in women?

But perhaps this sort of behaviour points more to the public spaces that women now inhabit which, once upon a time, were predominantly male domains. In the industry that I work in there is a strong patriarchal culture accompanied by a paternalism that is often marked by men who wear suits. This paternalism is evident in so many ways and is seen for example through the predominance of male management where the industry is clearly if not dominated by women, women make up at least 50% of the workforce. Yet this is not reflected in the new management structure which is overwhelmingly dominated by men.

Workplace cultures too are not generally spaces and practices that reward women, being unfriendly towards reproductive women and carers, two major roles that women often undertake in their lives, sometimes contemporaneously and accompanied by an active work life as well. Legislative changes – at least for many working in the public sector – have allowed women to adopt multiple roles and there is recognition in pay and conditions for some of the complex changes and demands that are made on women’s lives, for example through maternity leave and recognition of the rights and needs of carers. But I would still argue that the workplace is constructed as a male domain, with taken-for-granted understandings about how to work, workplace practices and interactions being embedded within worlds that are constructed through inherited, dominant understandings of what it means to be a worker that are gleaned from history, both past and recent that reflect male understandings of work practices and processes.

And this is reflected in the practice of language and workplace communications too. I recently witnessed a co-worker forced to take down a magnet with a message about angry women and hormones because it was ‘offensive’. It wasn’t offensive to everyone, but it certainly was a caustic but humorous joke about the stage of life that all women go through with its accompanying, inexplicable but predictable mood swings.

The question of language and its use and abuse raises issues around acculturation and how we reward and punish transgressions in children’s language. What do we teach the generation of young girls growing up now? By ‘teach’ I mean too the unspoken, inchoate lessons that are taught through our own responses, our own behaviours, our own modelling of how to be in the world. Children watch closely, often mimic but above all learn through experiencing life at the hands of their qualified teachers: siblings, parents, friends, extended family, school and the wider society often represented through media and entertainment. How do we teach them to privilege their own voices, their own experiences, author their own stories without these having to be constantly qualified by others?

If the authentic voice is what we seek to hear, seek to experience, witness and participate in, then why as a society are we muzzling and reinterpreting our women’s and girls voices?

Yearning for and a sense of community

We all need a group of people to belong to, a group with which we share common understandings, common experiences hopefully even a shared history. Once upon a time these groups were clear cut, we belonged to families, extended families, and communities whether geographically bound, or virtual due to our common links. But try as I might, I never feel that I really belong anywhere, and I suspect that I’m not so alone in my plight.

While my work offers me a sense of professional identity, do I want to hang out with work mates after hours? Not usually. I did the other night though because someone was getting married and we all participated in a hen’s night. That’s for another post. And while we have a body of knowledge and practices that bind us, challenge us, inspire us, give us cause to write, speak, teach and help, not everyone’s necessarily on the same page at work and disciplinary differences often rear their heads preventing companionship outside of work obligations.

My family of origin? I have no sense of connection with them anymore, indeed while I often wonder how they’re all doing and am happy to vicariously participate in their lives through what they choose to publicly share on Facebook, I have no desire to socialise with them at all. In fact, I actively seek to avoid them because of a history that I don’t wish to detail here. So my natal family may offer a sense of connectedness through blood, and name and kinship but community? No one was around when I had my children, and if there is a time in your life when you desperately need a community of support, this is that time. And they lived across the city and aside from coming around to see me once or twice, they left me to my own devices.

Except for my sister. As an adult I have found a sense of continuity through my relationship with my sister and her family. There is always someone. And she is this someone who provides my connection with my natal family. She’s good for news, good for gossip and makes good family.

I’ve mentioned children, so how about mother’s group? These women, younger and older were my lifeblood for the first five years of my first child’s life. They offered companionship, a weekly destination and a sense of belonging to a shared cause, that of brand new parenthood. We all stumbled as we learned and loved our weekly get-together as our babies played and we grew into parenthood accompanied by never-ending play dates, coffee and the occasional w(h)ine. But as with all groups, there is a period of coming together before differences force people apart, and now three out of ten of us meet up once every six months or so as our children approach their 15th birthdays.

My neighbourhood? Neighbourhood are funny places. You spend countless hours checking out properties, but not nearly as much time checking out your neighbourhood. We have a great neighbourhood, but neighbourhoods too are built on commonalities, and most of the people on the street either have grown up children who’ve moved out and married, or have toddlers of the opposite sex to my children. We move in parallel universes as the rhythms of life propel us in particular directions, in different time planes.

The school? Schoolyards are funny places too. I desperately wanted to meet parents when my eldest child started school. I was breaking my neck to chat, organise get-togethers, have coffee and meet up with people. I really tried to put on my best face. But some bonds are stronger than others and there was another mother’s group who had bonded strongly and their kids were just starting school… I eventually tired of being looked over, looked past and not included in activities. Or perhaps they just didn’t like me. But now that the children have finished primary school I hear that this mother’s group are still going away with all the family groups that belong to their group. That’s wonderful. That’s the sort of sense of community that I yearn for too, one that stretches across time through all the changes and challenges that living brings. I used to leave the school fighting back tears in the afternoons sometimes. People don’t intend to exclude you, but that’s just how it happens sometimes.

I did meet people from that school, and have made an effort to be close to the parents of my kids’ friends, especially where a connection is created. The unhappy part of this is now witnessing some of these families falling apart as partners grow, change and seek to move away from their partners and children as they recreate themselves anew, or seek to live in and acknowledge the truth of themselves, something that they were unable to do within the confines of marriage. This turbulence makes these friendships turbulent. I’m there for them but they seek me out less and less as they don’t want to intrude.

I joined a community health group recently. I feel like we’re all on the same page, even though there are differences based on age. I share a common bond with this group and we don’t have to gild the lily when we speak. I get that sense of openness that you sometimes experience when you’re on a bus talking to a stranger. You’re not judged, you’re not criticised and you feel accepted. For the part of my life that relates to our health concerns, this group of people are wonderful. Yet even they are a little reticent and I suspect that this comes about because of cultural factors that relate to saving face within their broader community.

High school friends? The maintenance of friendships is a difficult task. This is especially true across time, and while one of my closest school friends and I found each other about ten years ago and realised that we’d both had similarities in how we’d spent our time and that we only lived about ten blocks from each other, we had changed because of the passage of time. We were no longer as close, even though we had spent time growing into ourselves in each other’s company over those fervent years through all our schooling and a little beyond. Joe Cocker helped too.  We both married late and had children about the same age who now attended the same school. Now we move into new paths of shared history making as we move into middle age together.

But everything looks different from the other side. I imagine that everyone else’s life is full, fuller than my own. I imagine you you’re all connected to work, families, mother’s groups, neighbourhoods, schools and groups that hold special interest for you. I’m forever standing in the backyard looking over the fence and imagining that your lives are better, more fun, more active, more social, full of less angst, happier, more fulfilling, more meaningful, full of trips away and fabulous get-together’s and greater opportunities than mine. I’m sure that you all drink less, exercise more, have less fat and sugar in your diet, eat 40gms of fibre daily and don’t need to take Vitamin D supplements. I bet your calendars are full and that weeknight dinners with friends are a common thing and that you have fabulous Christmas’s and holiday abroad annually.

I have to work hard at being sociable these days, even though by nature I’m absolutely not anti-social. I love to talk, and to listen. I love a shared history. I love to grizzle too, and complain and not take any good fortune for granted either. But it’s hard to find a sense of community, a sense of belonging. I think that my inner grumpy self has taken hold and puts people off. I’m going to have my own TV show: grumpy old women – the early years.

But perhaps it’s more to do with my own psychology, my own personal limitations and my own inability to respond, to participate and to give of myself that prevents my full membership in any of the groups I yearn to belong to. Because in truth, in order to be part of something bigger than yourself, you have to be, well, bigger than yourself. Like everything in life, there is reciprocity involved here, both the giving and the getting.

In anthropology we talk a lot about communities. Groups and groupings are the mainstay of our work. We have theories that allow us to conceptualise, discuss, deconstruct and construct the social and cultural factors that allow us to create, sustain and live within communities. We look too at the destruction of communities and theorise about this, along with the factors that lead to successful reconstructions following crises. The way people come together and form, and re-form groups is endlessly fascinating and ever changing. It’s important because after all, groups and groupings constitute our very basis of identity and belonging. As part of this, anthropologists examine all the beliefs and rituals that accompany and dictate life in various communities. In this way we can see how our very identities are tied up with these same communities to which we belong or seek to connect with.

So, after having described some of the worlds in which I circulate, why do I feel so disengaged? Are the reasons social? Or are they personal? Are there structural barriers to my participation and belonging? Or is it merely my sense, my perception? Is Facebook and the creation of its virtual, eternal present community of ‘Friends’ in part to blame? Is it the fact that ‘likes’ are only momentary and not deep enough to be long lasting? Or is it an issue that pertains more to my perception of myself as having less in common with those around me and focusing too much on the differences between us and not the similarities? I imagine that family, church and village used to take care of a good deal of one’s identity in the past, but these structures have changed and we are sometimes left wondering about the replacements, and the void.

Did everyone get an invite to the party except me?  If you want to go to parties then you have to throw them too.