Author: Don Seeman PhD

Dear Student Colleagues,

I hope you have been enjoying our course so far! I have been eagerly reading your blog posts and responses and wanted to take a few moments to address something– how we read the sorts of texts we are encountering this semester, which may  be new to some of you.

The first rule, I think, in approaching any sort of text is to begin by asking yourself some basic questions: who is the author and what methodologies are being used? What basic claims is the author making? Are the methods invoked the right ones to answer these questions? Who is the intended audience? Is there a political or other agenda of which readers should be aware? Did the author actually succeed in doing what they set out to do?

Now, it is really important to read carefully and be alert to details, including possible contradictions. For example, in module 1, several of you wrote that you appreciated Marcia Inhorn’s argument about avoiding stereotypes of Muslim men, especially in the post 9/11 period. This is certainly on its own an important and legitimate argument to make.  But did she really present any evidence that the specific kind of data she was collecting could serve as a response to any widespread stereotypes? What was the relation between her stated political goals and the anthropological argument she was making? Does it complicate her argument in any way that she actually identifies some of the people she was writing about as supporters of Hezbollah, a well-known terror organization according to the US State Department? is she therefore saying that support for a terror organization is outweighed by stated concern for one’s wife? I am not asking this question is order to suggest that her argument is necessarily wrong, but simply to point out  that this is the kind of critical question one ought to ask in approaching a work of this nature.

This week, we are reading Susan Kahn’s book “Reproducing Jews.” I have already pointed out some errors in one of this week’s blog posts which were not noted by others who commented on the blogs. Kahn does NOT for example suggest that use of IVF is illicit according to Orthodox Judaism or rabbinic opinion. Rather, she explains that the rabbis in question require certain kinship rules to be respected when this technology is used, and this leads to interesting political alliances between unlikely partners. Historical traumas and desire to increase the population may be part of this dynamic  but they are by no means the determinative factors according to Kahn.

If these things were not clear, you need to go back and reread those chapters. Is this rabbinic approach more similar to that of Donum Vitae or to the approach of Shiite clerics in Marcia Inhorn’s article? How would you explain those similarities or dissimilarities? These are the kinds of questions I would like you to begin asking.

All texts require patience and care but this may be especially true of ethnographic texts. If you are used to the author simply telling you the argument up front, you need to take a more relaxed attitude and take your time– the evidence in ethnographic texts tends to be presented in more extended, narrative form–and, you need to be careful that the ethnography actually supports what the anthropologist says it does!

I know that we are doing a lot of reading in a short period of time during summer semester but please, take your time and go through the readings carefully. You will benefit from the results!

With very best wishes,

Don Seeman

In the advance reading for this class, anthropologist Clifford Geertz explains the philosophical background to ethnography as a research method. Though he tells a complex story about intrigue and sheep-stealing from his fieldwork in Morocco, probably the simplest way to understand what Geertz has to say is through his own analogy of “the wink.” It goes something like this: I see what looks like a wink. But how do I know what it really means? After all, it could be a sign of some shared joke, a sexual innuendo, an unconscious twitch, or it could be directed towards someone else or mean something else entirely that I have not yet discovered (a pre-arranged code for an attack). The only way I can parse this most basic meaning-making, according to Geertz, is through the use of context clues (do I know the person, what is our previous relationship like, what else is going on in the social field and, importantly, are there some shared cultural meanings to winking that I need to know about?). But if this is true even of some simple gesture like a wink, how much more so the complex and nuanced words and behaviors that people use in everyday life! How can I ever be sure I understand what is really going on, especially as shared experience between people or shared cultural background wanes?G

Geertz’s answer to that question is: Ethnography (also known as anthropological fieldwork or participant observation). By increasing the time and intimacy of the relationship between the researcher and the phenomenon they are studying it becomes easier to recognize context clues and more likely to read them correctly. I need to learn not only the local language but the local culture, body language, history of individuals and structural relations between them (who owes money to whom? Who has power here?). Ethnography is the process of learning all of those things through relatively long term participant observation or learning by being and doing in some local setting–and then writing it all down for analysis.

This is the first reading of the semester so there is not a lot to compare and contrast it with, but I am left with some questions. For one thing, Geertz seems to imply that the job of the ethnography is to “thickly” (i.e. with lots of detail and context) describe everything I witness during research. But is this even possible? Don’t I need some way to decide even before I get started what I will pay more or less attention to? If you think about thickly describing “everything” from even a 20 minute observation of your home or classroom you will realize how difficult, even hopeless a task that could be. Geertz is a good writer, but he does not really tell us how he decided to describe what he described out of all the infinite possibilities of description he would have met in the field. He focused for example on sheep steeling, not on people’s sexual relations, the history of Moroccan Judaism and Islam or the environmental factors constraining life in the Atlas Mountains etc. etc. etc. Does he implicitly adopt the view of one group of his informants or does he manage to really position himself outside the fray as a truly objective observer?

This leads me to another  thorny problem. Geertz says that context is everything. But does this mean that nothing has any intrinsic meaning of its own, outside of context? Is everything reducible to culture? Given that we will speaking in this class about seemingly hard and objective matters like assisted reproductive technology and people’s physiological capacities and limitations, do we need another kind of analytic language that does not threaten to go all postmodern on us? Or is Geertz really less postmodern than he seems?

What does any of this have to do with bioethics or human reproduction?

 

Dear class,

Welcome to our Scholar Blogs site. In addition to our synchronous meetings, this is likely to be the most important place where we communicate with one another, share ideas and (importantly!) upload assignments.

Starting next Thursday, a different group of students will be responsible for posting their individual blogs about each week’s readings. These can include SOME summary of the readings, but their more important goal is to analyze, offer context, compare with readings from previous weeks or raise questions for conversations about each module’s reading. In my NEXT post, I will give you an example based on the reading for the first class.

You will also use this site to respond to one another’s blogs each week– offering constructive criticism to help each other succeed and also simply continuing conversations that will help to prepare for and build on our synchronous sessions. You can be funny, creative, whatever you like, just so long as you cover the key points in the readings.

When you post, please follow my example and put your name and module number in the Title window along with any other title you would like to include. It helps me to keep track of who has written.

Here are the assignments for writing Blog Posts. I do not mind if you trade dates with other students for your own convenience as long as there are multiple Blogs for every week of class. Make sure you let me know of any changes in advance.

(Module 1) Due Thursday May 18 (special date; responses due next day)- Jessica Ambroise; Hanna Lee

(Module 2) Due Monday May 22: Courtney Andrews, Jonathan Chay; Suzie Waltzer

(Module 3 ) Due Weds May 31: Tanique MacDonald, Aashreen Puri; Taylor Mehalko

(Module 4) Due Weds June 7: Sylvie Moscovitz; Alana Redden; Kennede Miller

(Module 5) Due Weds June 14: Hayley Rose Keats; Emma Alafe; Mame Kane.

 

Please consult your syllabus for information about grading and assessment as well as online etiquette or “netiquette.”

best wishes,

Dr. Seeman

 

 

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