Hello, and welcome to episode 49 of Structure Visions. Structure Visions is a space where I explore new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is Dirty Clark, and I'm very grateful for you listening. Today, you are very welcome here.
Today's episode is called Calling All Ethnographers. And I'm going to refer to something that kind of pops up from time to time in these podcasts. The astute listener might be noticing a kind of thing that pops up from time to time. And we'll see if you notice it.
I'm going to begin by talking about a class that I've taught for many, many years called Language and Gender. And in Language and Gender, often people think students come to this class thinking that it's going to be about the difference between the way in which men and women speak and how it comes about. Men say certain things in certain ways. And normally that comes down to making assumptions about how men interrupt more than women.
And they're louder. And they're potentially more aggressive. And oysters and less polite. And women are more polite.
And they hedge more often. And they apologize more. And they don't interrupt as much. And they blend together.
That type of thing. And the class discusses that a little bit, but mostly to problematize it and to ask questions about it. And the theme of the class more is about why is it that we're so obsessed with gender. Then how does that come through in language?
Why is everybody so captivated by this idea that there's pink and there's blue, and that there's girls' clothes and boys' clothes, and that when a baby is born, we need to have these parties to find out, well, just before the baby's born, we have a party to reveal whether it's a boy or a girl, and whether we're going to buy baseball bats or dolls. Why are we so obsessed with this male-female thing? And I guess maybe it's most contemporary iteration is in, why is everybody talking about bathrooms? Everybody's so obsessed about, oh, no.
If people are transgender, what happens if someone who's gender, I can't nail down, walks into my bathroom and puts my children at risk? It's a little bit when you look at it that way, it does seem a little bit absurd. So then the point of language and gender is to say why are we so captivated by it, and how can we notice that captivation in language, and how can we see how this obsession repeats itself, and where can we notice it, and how do we notice it in text? And one classic way of looking at that would be to look at sexist jokes.
And you can unpick a sexist joke if you look at the grammar of it, and you explore some of the assumptions that underlie a sexist joke. So in order for a sexist joke to be funny, it will only be funny if you access the assumption behind the joke. If you don't have access to that assumption, you don't get it. And this is one of the reasons why we like jokes.
It kind of invites you into a bit of an in-crowd. So knock, knock, who's their orange orange, who orange a glad I didn't say banana. You'll only get that joke if you've ever been subject to some little kid saying to you over and over again, knock, knock, who's their orange, knock, knock, who's their orange, knock, who's their orange, orange a glad I didn't say banana. So you have to have access, even for that, because that silly joke, you have to have access to a whole set of assumptions.
One of them is the structure of a knock, knock joke, the call and response element of it, the interactional exchange, I guess, would be a better way of putting it. You also have to have an understanding of the homophone orange and how that's supposed to be a homophone of orange, you know, so you have to have access to all of those different things. And you also have to have access to having experienced somebody doing that thing when they say knock, knock, who's their orange, over and over and over again. So we were looking in this class language and gender at sexist jokes.
And we were, and I was experiencing from the class, a little bit of potential maybe guilt and also a fair amount of defiance. And the guilt was like, oh, I actually think those jokes are pretty funny. With the understanding, the assumption that I'm not supposed to find them funny. So people are kind of a little bit like, don't want to get a little joke, because we're discovering the underlying ideology, which is bad.
And so luckily, I had a few students in the class who were prepared to be a little defiant. And they were saying that they weren't being defined in any kind of aggressive or nasty way. They were just feeling open enough to say, come on. Can we just admit that we think the jokes are funny, and why is it wrong to laugh at a sexist joke?
OK, A. I never said it was wrong to laugh at a sexist joke. But B, how did I respond? Pay attention to how I responded.
I just took the question. I think that we had a joke. I can't remember what the joke was. But we had a joke up on the screen.
And a student says, I admit it. I think it's funny. It was a female student. I admit it.
I think it's funny. Are you telling me it's not OK to laugh at sexist jokes? Is it OK to find them funny? And so I thought about it for a second.
And I thought, well, and then I revealed something. And I said, well, here's the thing. I come from another planet. And then the student said, oh, I think I finally become revealed to her.
Like, she finally got it. Like, out of all the things that we were studying in language and gender, and probably everything else that I'd ever taught her. And she's like, oh, I get it. I get it.
You come from another planet. Like, she was taking me totally seriously. No, if you've been listening astutely to these podcasts, this business of me coming from another planet, or relying on the notion, imagine I was coming from another planet, actually comes up quite frequently. So who knows?
Maybe I do come from another planet. But it was just so funny how out of everything that I said, the thing that made the most sense to her as evidenced by the, oh, you know, that moment, that epiphany, when somebody finally understands something, something is finally revealed, she's like, I get it now. You come from another planet. And so then we have this conversation about me coming from another planet, and what's your planet like?
So she's like, oh, you come from another planet. And I'm like, yeah. And she said, well, so on your planet, our sexist jokes nobody laughs at that. Everybody's just totally politically correct all the time.
I said, no. No, we don't even have a notion of political correctness on my planet. And she says, oh, what? Do you not have gender?
I said, oh, no, no, we've got gender. We've got gender in my planet. In fact, we've got much more than two genders on our planet. I think Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five mentions that on his planet, he visits when he gets lost in time.
The planet he visits has lots and lots of different genders. But I said, yes, you know, in my planet, there's lots and lots of different genders. We definitely have gender. We're just not obsessed with it.
It's not the most important thing that can be used to define your identity. So when we see a sexist joke, it's not that we don't get it, because we are kind of studying your planet and we know that you're obsessed with gender. But it's just not that interesting in terms of its humor value. So she's like, OK, right, it's not funny to you.
And I'm like, well, it's not that we're offended by it. It's just not funny. And so everyone starts doing in this conversation about what my planet is like. And somebody says, well, what?
So you don't make jokes on your planet. And I'm like, no, no, we make lots of jokes. Lots of stuff is really funny. And then they were like, your planet sounds so boring.
It would just be so boring if we were all the same. And I said, well, wait, hold on. Why did you assume that everybody on my planet was the same? I said, oh, well, because you don't really have gender.
I'm going to say we can have gender. But go ahead and say what you're saying. If everybody's the same and you don't get to make a distinction between the genders and everybody's just exactly the same. And they wear the same clothes and they act in the same way.
And they style their hair in exactly the same way. Then there's absolutely no difference. And it would be so boring. And I said, oh my gosh, you're absolutely right.
It would be so boring if everybody was exactly the same. Absolutely. But on our planet, there's a million gazillion, trabillion, johillion ways of being different. In fact, the assumption is that every person is completely and utterly different from anyone else.
And gender really doesn't have that much to do with how people are different. I said, on this planet, there's a couple of different things that make people different from each other. One of them is gender. And people are quite obsessed with that.
So you divide up the world so that pink and blue, and chick flicks, and guy flicks, and bathrooms with symbols on them. I said, in my world, every single person is totally different. The assumption is just from the starting point that every single person is totally different, so that when you encounter a different person, it's absolutely hilarious because they're just so weird. And so the whole planet is a joke.
In a way, the whole planet is hilarious. Everyone is completely different. And so this didn't really make that much sense to the students. Because it's like, well, OK, great.
You've got your planet. We've got ours. What you're trying to say that you want our planet to be like yours. And I thought, oh, I'm interested in this planet thing.
But now what I really thought was, well, actually, no. This whole me being on a different planet thing is like, OK, I have a vision of the social world in which the problems that present themselves in this world don't present themselves in this other world. That's kind of like, when I see a big obsession or a big problem bathrooms, homophobia, racism, all this kind of stuff, transphobia. And I think, wow, my view is it would be absurd in the social vision, in the social world I want to live in, for these things to even present themselves as issues.
And yet, the students say to me, so you're trying to get our planet to look like your planet. And I thought, no, no, no. Because to do that would be a form of imperialism. The way my planet does it is better.
Your planet could learn from my planet. Therefore, you should do what we do. How could you? How could a planet that is obsessed with certain things suddenly not be obsessed?
Because it has a view of the world where people don't obsess about these things. It simply doesn't happen that way. If you find a joke funny, you find a joke funny. There's no amount of me saying you shouldn't find that funny.
There's no amount of me from my high-falutin planet telling you that you should have a different view. Your view is your view. So why deal with the question of social injustice or new visions of the social or new ways of thinking about social structure at all? And if you do, how do you deal with that without being some kind of social or cultural imperial?
That's not going to come in with my view. I'm going to teach you to do it better. Well, there's a mechanism that I learned about, a kind of approach to study that I learned about when I was doing my PhD. I decided that I was going to engage in something that I've mentioned before, which is called an ethnography.
And I decided to do an ethnography of the hockey team, one of the hockey teams, Field Hockey. Women's Field Hockey team at the university where I was doing my PhD. And so what I did was I got in touch with the people in the hockey team and said, look, I want to study you. Is that OK?
And they were like, I don't know. What's it going to entail? And I said, well, I'd like to come to your matches. And I'd like to go to your social events.
And I would love to invite you in groups over to my flat for meals. And I'd like to serve you a meal. And I'd like to record your conversations. And then I'd like to analyze those conversations.
Would that be OK? And I said, I tell you what, we'll send the first year students. And we'll find out from them. And if we get a good report, then the rest of us are joining them.
So that's what they did. And so I had a great group of hockey players coming over regularly, eating these big meals that I had a great fun preparing and recording their conversations and then transcribing them and analyzing them. And it was funny, because when they asked me at these meals as they inevitably did, well, what are you actually doing? And I said, well, I'm doing an ethnography.
And they said, sorry, we don't actually know what that means. What does that mean? And I said, well, an ethnography, it's a word that used to be used when people were trying to find out about the most primitive cultures. And they're like, oh, gee, thanks, primitive cultures.
It's not just used for that anymore. But it used to be we're going to go into what we are calling a primitive tribal culture. And we're going to find out the kind of rules and customs and rituals and meaning systems that are at the heart of this culture. And we're going to study it as a kind of social fact.
We're not going to assume that these cultures are somehow not as good as our culture. Even though they might not have the same technology and they might not have the same social institutions, we're going to look at them from a purely objective standpoint and say, this is the way this culture operates. And I'm going to find out as much as I can about its language and its institutions and its meaning systems. And so that's kind of where that started.
And then I said to them, but then it turned into, well, let's do ethnographies of cultures that are actually quite similar to our own. In fact, let's recognize that any given culture is made up of lots of different mini cultures, like a team. And I said, but it doesn't have to just be a group that has some kind of inner consistency or coherence, if you like. You can also do ethnography of people who engage in the same activity, even if they don't know each other.
Does it happen? I happen to be reading an ethnography at the time of men who visit prostitutes. So I said, for example, people who go visit prostitutes, you could do an ethnography of them. And they're like, right.
So effectively, an ethnography is when you go study primitive people or porn addicts. And I was like, let me explain again. So I didn't explain myself very well. Then I don't know if I'm explaining it any better now.
But at the time that I was doing the ethnography, and it was a lot of work, but it was just so enjoyable. At the time I was doing the ethnography, I was reading lots of books about how to do them. And this is a method. An ethnography is one method.
So when you're doing any type of research, you have to be clear about what method you're using. And this is a form of what's called qualitative research. Qualitative research is often contrasted with quantitative research. It's a way of finding out information about the world that doesn't rely on categorizing things and dividing them up and measuring them in some kind of quantitative way, in other words, in a way that relies on quantities counting.
Instead, qualitative research always involves the researcher committing to interpreting the data. So the data is going to come in in the form of field notes or of conversations or potentially of images. You might take photos, that type of thing, and somehow or interviews that type of thing. And somehow the researcher has to synthesize and interpret and summarize the data.
And this is what qualitative research is. And in ethnography, the task in ethnography is to enter into a world. I was reading this book about ethnography at the time, because it's like if you're going to do one, you're going to find out about it. So I can't remember what the book was.
I got it out of the library. And it was explaining how you do ethnography. And the different principles. Now, every ethnography is completely different, because every world that you enter will be different.
So all you can do is give overarching principles about the spirit in which you undertake ethnography and some helpful hints. So I'm reading this book. And one of the things that says is you need to adopt the position of the insider outsider. So you actually need to become, to a certain extent, an insider in whatever world you're entering.
So if you're entering the world of a hockey team, it's not enough to watch the matches and to watch what they're doing and say, oh, well, at 8 PM on every Wednesday evening, they go to the Students Union, and they engage in drinking activities. You have to find out why that is a valuable activity for them as a group, and what it does for them. How does it, why do they do it? What, how does it articulate with the other practices, of the group, what happens there?
How do people engage with this activity? Why does it matter to them? Not so much, why does it matter to you as a researcher, but why does it matter to them? And you need to notice the things that make people anxious or that are important to them, or that are the ways in which they evaluate situations.
So you need to have an insider perspective. You need to have an empathetic lens with which to understand what's happening. However, you can't become a total insider. You also have to make sure you've got your observer going, right?
You need to be noticing these things as an outsider, because if you get so wrapped up in it, then you stop noticing what's meaningful, and you stop noticing how things might be otherwise, and you stop making connections between various things. And to be an insider without simultaneously being an outsider means you're not going to have anything to report on, really. You're not going to be able to say, let's describe this as an isolated unit and see how the meanings work. So there's all these descriptions of how to do ethnography, and I found utterly fascinating.
And I actually defaced the library book. Now I went ahead and rubbed it out later, but I found myself writing in the margins. I think ethnography is how I do my life. It really did feel like the way that I go through my world, ever since I was a little child, where I'd walk in, and you walk into your kindergarten classroom, and you think, oh, OK, I need to pay attention to these things that are supposed to matter.
You're supposed to make sure that you please the teacher in these ways, and if you do it in these ways, then you get gumdrops. And even though gumdrops don't taste that good, they matter. It's important to have the gumdrops, because they matter more than just that they taste good. Now I don't know that my kindergarten mind was operating at quite that level of articulateness, but it does feel like the way I go through my world.
Oh, right. I'm supposed to wear those clothes and those clothes. And as an outsider, I'm not really sure why, but it is supposed to matter. Oh, it's starting to matter.
Oh, people are making fun of me. Oops, starting to matter a lot. Oh, I'm becoming very insider here. And since this process of things that seem like they shouldn't matter, like maybe gender, suddenly starts to matter.
And to me, it felt like this whole ethnography feels like the way I'm living my life. Now, the important thing about ethnography is you suspend judgment during the time that you're doing the ethnography, but you don't completely suspend judgment. Now I was doing something called critical ethnography, which was I'm going to go ahead and take a stand. So I'm not going to be completely objective.
Not only am I going to interpret the information I receive as I'm entering into this world, I'm also going to take a stand and actually be judgmental of it. So for instance, but I'm not going to do that as an insider. I'm going to do the judging as an outsider. So just as an example, the thing that caught my attention most as I was doing the ethnography was the attitudes of the participants towards the gay members of the team.
I've talked about this before. So I'm sitting at the dinner table and I'm being as quiet as I can be so that people feel comfortable to talk to each other. And I'm asking pertinent questions. Sometimes I already know the answers to the questions anyway to see what the response will be.
And I'm noticing that the participants that the people are coming over to my flat have attitudes about the gay members of the team and about being gay in general that are totally different from mine. They seem completely unaccepting. They seem completely unwilling to accept that some people are gay and that it's fine to be gay that there's nothing wrong with being gay. And so instead what happened was many of the participants were kind of theorizing about it.
And they were theorizing in a sort of diagnostic way. Well, they're gay because they lack self-confidence. That was one thing. Or they're gay because they're not fully developed yet.
They're going through a stage. And they're gay because they're not totally aware of how much they actually want children. But they really do want children. And therefore that means they must not be gay.
And it's a peer pressure thing. Like one person is gay and then the other person becomes gay just because they feel like they need to fit in. It's all about fitting in. And so they were kind of diagnosing.
And of course the second you're diagnosing, then you're saying that something is a problem. And I'm going to find the root of that problem. What's that called? Epidemiology or something like that.
So they were doing epidemiology if that's the right word of particular type of sexuality. And so my job is not as an ethnographer to say, oh, I disagree with you. I can disagree with people in my daily life. As an ethnographer, the point is not to say, ah, you're given social world wrong.
Sorry. That's just unethical. Sorry. That's immoral.
You shouldn't see the world like that. If I had done that, it would have been game over. You know, they're like, OK, yeah, thanks for the meal. Yep, OK, have a nice one.
And also, what would I have to report on? What would I actually be exploring in my thesis? What I say, oh, OK, well, there were these people who were pretty homophobic. And I told them it was a bad idea.
And they shouldn't be homophobic. And then they listened to me or pretended to. And then that was the end of the ethnography. That isn't the point.
The point isn't. I disagree with you. And I'm going to convince you that my view is better. Or I live in a different world for you.
And my world is better than your world. And so I'm going to tell you about my world. Until you see that it's better for you to be part of my world. That's not the point.
The point is I have been invited into this community. And I recognize that I have different views. But I am curious about where your views emerge from and what they're linked up with and how they are part of the picture of living in your world. And so I kept questioning that and asking things about that, exploring it.
And what I noticed is that there was a more fundamental compulsion in this particular social world in this community, more fundamental than heteronitidity, more fundamental than simply saying it's bad to be gay. And the more fundamental value was something called success. And success, it was like you had to be successful. It was to everybody needed to be more successful than they already were, meaning they needed to be better hockey players, meaning they needed to get better grades, meaning that their team needed to be the best hockey team, that they needed to be moving upwards in the ranks all of the time.
They needed to be better, better, better, better. Kind of like there's ladders from last week. You've got to climb a ladder, you've got to get better, better, better, better, better. And I noticed that they very frequently made a connection between people being gay and bizarrely, them not being very good hockey players, even though that was completely false.
They made a connection. They spoke about the gay people who were on the lower teams, who weren't very good. And I suddenly realized that being successful in this community also meant getting into a heterosexual partnership, eventually getting married in that heterosexual partnership, and eventually having kids. And they were looking at a wider picture, which was more than just success on the hockey team, but it was success in wider life.
And for them success was a very gendered issue. Success meant you got the man, you got the job, you got the kids. And so what they were doing when they were looking at their fellow players was seeing them as less successful when they weren't heterosexual. And seeing that as, well, they'll grow out of it.
At some point, they'll learn how to be more successful. In the same way that on the hockey page show, the first year is maybe you don't have the same amount of skill or prowess or composure. They'll learn that. They'll develop that as they advance through their years on the team.
In the same way, the gay players will suddenly develop some confidence and become less gay. The point here is not so much to reveal the seeming absurdity of that. Even if it does seem absurd, it's more an invitation to say, let's be an ethnographer when something about the social world seems problematic to us. When something about the social world seems pretty immoral or unethical.
There's an invitation there to say, let me enter into that world for a moment and see all of the various players. Let's see how the meaning systems play. Let's see how they play together. Let's see how one thing doesn't just mean who I'm going to be on the phone.
But it also means something else that all these things are connected. Or, oh, they're saying these things are completely irrational. Most of us do things irrational isn't bad. Irrational is something that we can get into.
Irrational is like the other, right? Irrational is, let's delve into that. Let's enter into that. And let's see what matters to people.
And when we can see what actually matters to other people, then we can see a new way of understanding something. And so with the hockey team, it's like, wow, this is interesting. There's all these ways of measuring success. And this issue of how you measure success is not just linked to the hockey team.
This is got a wider picture. And the ways in which women understand themselves as needing to be successful might be different generally from how men do. And so then suddenly we have this reason for why there might be a little bit of an obsession with the gender thing, the male, female, blue, pink, whatever. And so we say, ah, OK, this perspective, this entering into the inside, and staying outside and inside at the same time, possibly makes it possible for us to see how a new image emerges from the old image.
So the new image doesn't come from the new planet. It doesn't come from my social world, which is better than yours. The new image comes from inside the social world itself. And that's something that ethnography taught me.
I do things a little bit differently now. I don't necessarily engage in full-blown ethnographies, but that ethnographic spirit of get into the inside of the social world, but remain outside of it and see how the new possibility comes from the inside itself. That's the thing that I've taken with me. Thank you very much for listening today.
I hope to join me again next time. Have a great week.