David,
This is a tremendous fable you tell: I reproduce it below: :
A sociologist completed a $500,000 statistical study in order to find a
brothel in his city. He rushed to that establishment only to find the
anthropologist in the lounge playing the piano.
The story wonderfully displays the ambiguity of both anthropology and FBI
informanthood. Think how different the story would have been if the
anthrpologist had been the madam. How about a short story in which the piano
player is an anthropologist, the madam is an fbi informant, the book keeper is
a sociologist, and all the working girls and boys turn out to be city vice
cops. Let the story unfold when the city in which this is all true hosts a
sociological convention on Vice in America and all the sociologists end up at
the whore house. At Clark, in our working group, I kept pressing the question
of why we would not accept [such] a work of fiction as a PhD dissertation. Let
the climactic scene in the story be the one in which the I of the story, a
science reporter from the New Yorker sent to cover the Convention, sits the
whole "staff" of the bawdy house down to explain the situation to them. The
ending should be done as a rip on one of those sherlock home endings, where
each player's role is revealed to the gasps of the others.
Did you know that Audubon, whose portfolio of drawings, Birds of America is
breathtakingly accurate, also wrote a text called ornithological biographies.
While it had considerable scientific notareity in its time, particularly in
England, it was patently confabulated. Audubon, who NEVER painted a bird
except at life size, simply didnt have the same standards for verbal
representation as he did for visual representation. So, you cannot trust it!
Because every tenth sentence contains a whopper, all the other sentences are
worthless.
I find that truth matters to me, even though I am not sure what it is. I would
read Ornithological Biographies if I thought the author was tryng to be true,
but would find it boring if I thought the author was trying to tell me a good
tale. Is telling the truth like keeping the rhyme scheme in a poem; free form
is too easy?
Mike Agar and I try to discuss this from time to time but we always end up
hurling plates and cups at each other from opposite sides of the room. Where
does the truth come from and how do we recognize it when we see it? Two simple
questions. Why cant we just answer them? I like to think that it comes from
the dialectic between everything and everything else: truth as emergent. UGH!
When we all teach our PhD program together, we are going to have to come up
with something better than that! In our future Phd program, these issues will
be settled. Perhaps some day Stu will deliver the answers on a tablet from
Old Baldy.
Nick
> [Original Message]
> From: Prof David West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; The Friday MorningApplied
> Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>
> Date: 8/7/2007 9:29:02 AM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Rationalilzations or Causes?
>
>
>
> Prof. Thompson is correct and I replied such, but think it went only to
> him not the list. Anyway, that is why anthropologists insist on
> participant observation and rely a lot more on "natural" communication,
> stories, conversations, etc. than on formal interviews, quantitative
> data, and so called "qualitative" data collection used by sociologists.
>
> A sociologist completed a $500,000 statistical study in order to find a
> brothel in his city. He rushed to that establishment only to find the
> anthropologist in the lounge playing the piano.
>
> davew
>
> On Tue, 7 Aug 2007 11:19:39 EDT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
> > Fellow cohorts,
> >
> > I certainly agree with Herr Prof. Thompson. In my experience in
> > developing
> > (?) third and fourth world countries, people interviewed generally told
> > the
> > interviewer what they thought the interviewer would like to hear. This
> > was
> > particularly true for the poor who hoped to gain something from the
> > process.
> > Observation of what people actually do can be a more powerful tool at
> > times.
> > Ort simply letting people tell their story as was done in the remarkable
> > book
> > Aikenfield.
> >
> > Perhaps all GIS systems should include anecdotal information?
> >
> > Paul Paryski
> >
> >
> >
> > ************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new
> > AOL at
> > http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour
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