[Xmca-l] Re: The Science of Qualitative Research 2ed

[David Kellogg]

Back in 2001, Martin and Mark Tappan published an edited compilation with
SUNY press called "Cultural and Critical Perspectives on Human
Development".  Mark Tappan is a writer I admire as much as Martin himself:
he does moral education, and he is one of the few researchers that has
tried to take feminist insights from Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings and
make them operational in studies, so that we can do more than just deplore
or enthuse about our data--we can interpret and even change it.

And yet. There is curiously little moral judgment of the studies in the
book. So for example Chapter 3, by Usha Menon and Richard Shweder, purports
to be a "critique of critique". They do an ethnographic study of women in
an Orissa temple town. These women find middle age to be the most
satisfying and early adulthood the least satisfying moments of their life
trajectories (which is the opposite of most Western women). They explain
this by arguing that contrary to feminist anthropology, the women do not
deplore their social system nor try to find ways to subvert it, but instead
actively support and participate in it. I have three critiques of this
critique of critique, and I suppose they all boil down to moral judgment.

First of all, there is no mention of rape, of incest, of forced marriage,
of dowry, of bride burnings, or of any of the other burning issues which
have emerged in the social struggle against this social system. These are
all facts of Indian life as well. You can argue that they are not facts
that emerge in the data itself, but I think this is not true. So for
example one reason the women are willing to put up with the arduous
humiliations of early adulthood (e.g. daily washing of the feet of the
older women and then drinking the water used to wash them) might be that
they are looking forward to being able to humiliate others in turn.

Secondly, and relatedly, the religious explanations offered by the women
themselves are privileged. There are, I suppose, sound methodological
reasons for this, but the overall effect is, not incidentally, to mystify
what the women believe (to guard it from critique) and, not coincidentally,
to privilege the "emic" insider knowledge of the authors (to guard it as
"culture" against the perceived etic-ism of the "Western" Marxists and
feminists). If you utterly reject subjects and objects, don't you ALSO have
to reject the etic/emic distinction?

Thirdly, and also relatedly, "Marxists" and "feminists" are assumed to be
"Western". Right now, Marxism and feminism are probably more of a
mass phenomenon in India than in the West. So I think this particular move
on the part of the authors is particularly open to critique

Boxing was abolished in Russia and China as a gladiatorial form
of entertainment in which the patricians still preyed on the plebeians. For
reasons I never really understood, the German communists felt very
differently about it. But I am Chinese, I guess: I don't think boxing or
wrestling should be legal, much less legal "entertainment". Shouldn't a
critical cultural anthropology be able to look at cultural pathologies and
diagnose them? What is the point of an oncologist who interprets the
symptoms only in order to celebrate the cancer?

I also don' t think that Vygotsky is entirely above criticism in his use of
Thurnwald--Mike made some criticisms of this a few years ago when he and I
and Paula Towsey did the symposium which is still upon the xmca page. At
the time I dismissed them, but I am starting to think again.


David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full


On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 5:17 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:

> Ed,
>
> I think you’re referring to Garfinkel’s distinction between “instructions”
> and “instructed actions.” All instructions are necessarily incomplete,
> because to interpret and apply them requires background competence which
> cannot be itself the object of instruction.
>
> I think an interpretive approach can grapple with that issue to some
> degree, because any interpretation of what people say or do rests
> unavoidably on a prior understanding, as a skilled member of the community.
> (I cannot analyze an interview conducted in Spanish, for example, because I
> don’t have the necessary competence.) I don’t need to try to provide that
> competence; I can (I have to) assume that students already have it.
>
> When I struggle with teaching in the classroom, an essential resource for
> me is a sense (I’m sure it’s incomplete and inaccurate) of what and how the
> students are learning. I think that I am at times a successful practitioner
> in the teaching-learning business (so to speak), in the classroom.
>
> When writing a book, however, in which the aim is not simply to provide
> knowledge and argument but practical expertise in conducting an interview,
> for example, the feedback loop from teaching to learning has been cut. I
> can’t figure out how to reconnect the loose ends.
>
> Martin
>
>
> > On Jan 4, 2018, at 11:54 AM, Edward Wall <ewall@umich.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Martin
> >
> >     For various reasons I find this an interesting discussion; however
> it is your last sentence that catches my attention.
> >
> >     A number of years ago, Gary Fenstermacher wrote a short piece on the
> ontological dependence of teaching on learning. So it strikes me that an
> interesting additional question is, perhaps, ‘how does a person ‘learn’
> from this chapter to conduct research.’ An (not ‘the’) answer to that
> question, I suggest , can be found in the work of Garfinkel and
> Murleau-Ponty (and others). An (not ‘the’) answer to the teaching question,
> I think, can be found in the work of Dewey, Greene, Shulman, and Schwab
> (and others). Vygotsky, in an interesting way, cuts across
> teaching/learning somewhat.
> >
> >      Speaking for myself, I know that I have struggled with such
> learning/teaching questions in the area of mathematics for many years
> (pragmatically and theoretically) including how does one learn how to teach
> (children and teachers) or even research the teaching or learning of
> mathematics. I cannot say I see a satisfying end in sight.
> >
> >     Anyway, perhaps I can say it this way. While the chapter under
> discussion might well teach (and I use teach here as Fenstermacher) me how
> to do research what are termed 'language arts classrooms’ it is unlikely
> that I would easily learn how to do such despite the chapter (I think
> Garfinkel illustrates this, in part, nicely).
> >
> > Ed
> >
> >> On Jan 4, 2018, at  10:06 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Okay, yes. The new final chapter of the book uses as an example of
> research that is focused on constitution the study by Loïc Wacquant of
> boxers in a South Chicago gym. It is reported in Wacquant’s book “Body and
> Soul” and in various articles. For me it has the advantage that Wacquant
> conducted ethnography, carried out interviews, and even did some analysis
> of interactions, and these are the three ‘components’ of qualitative
> research that I focus on in the book.
> >>
> >> One of the articles by Wacquant is titled “The pugilistic point of
> view.” Ironically, in it he argues strongly that boxers don’t have “a point
> of view,” because that would imply that they are only observers of their
> own life. In a dense paragraph he manages to call into question statements
> about the goal of ethnography (and by implication of qualitative research
> generally) made by Malinowski, Geertz, and Dilthey, and proposes instead,
> drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Garfinkel, that his aim is to study, to
> ‘reconstruct,’ the “ontological complicity” of the boxers with the form of
> life of boxing.
> >>
> >> You can see the value of this in a book that seeks to question the
> assumption that qualitative research is the ‘objective study of
> subjectivity.’ Wacquant rejects ontological dualism (subject-object,
> subjectivity-objectivity) as much as Vygotsky did!
> >>
> >> But I’m not at all convinced that a chapter like this actually teaches
> a reader *how* to conduct research. At best, it can only be one component
> among several, and I haven’t yet figured out the others! I’m still in a
> childlike state, I guess.
> >>
> >> Martin
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Jan 3, 2018, at 9:08 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> I was referring to what you said about the second edition, Martin.
> Didn't
> >>> you say there was an ethnographic study of boxing in South Chicago? I
> >>> remember that the first edition didn't have much by way of concrete
> studies
> >>> in it: it was a sustained argument rather than a working hypothesis.
> But
> >>> maybe what I'm remembering is Greg's review of it and not my own; I
> think
> >>> what happened was that I looked at it and found that there was too much
> >>> methodology and not enough method for my students.
> >>>
> >>> See what you think of this, from Chapter Five of the pedology of the
> >>> adolescent. Vygotsky has argued that the crisis at adolescence is
> caused by
> >>> the non-coincidence of three peaks: general-organic, sexual, and
> cultural
> >>> historical development. Then he says:
> >>>
> >>> "Blonsky thought, profoundly, that at the end of childhood the child
> is an
> >>> anthropological analogue with so called “childish races”, i.e. with
> various
> >>> primitive tribes, lacking that period of development which commences
> after
> >>> sexual maturation but passing instead from childhood directly into the
> >>> state of sexual maturity. In Thurnwald we find some indications that
> the
> >>> epoch of sexual maturation is critical for the children of primitive
> >>> peoples, who in at school age find themselves on a par with
> enculturated
> >>> peoples but after maturation frequently cease advancing and manifest a
> >>> “relapse into primitivity”, sinking to the general level of the whole
> >>> tribe."
> >>>
> >>> Ugh. Thurnwald was a reviewer for the PhD thesis of Eva Justin, a
> nurse who
> >>> learned Romani in order to take part in the extermination of the
> gypsies.
> >>> After her PhD work was done, she arranged for the extermination and or
> >>> vivisection of all 29 of her research subjects. Thurnwald gave her a B.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> David Kellogg
> >>>
> >>> Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
> >>> Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
> >>> Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
> >>>
> >>> Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
> >>>
> >>> http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 10:24 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Sorry to be dense, David. Are you referring to my book?
> >>>>
> >>>> Martin
> >>>>
> >>>>> On Jan 2, 2018, at 5:56 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Martin--
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I thought that your solution--presenting concrete cases that were
> >>>>> theoretically defensible and yielded practical results for
> students--was
> >>>> a
> >>>>> good approach, and I was contrasting it with the alternatives:
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
>
>
>