It's Always More Complicated

More than 230 years ago, the country parson celebrated the small but vital elements that gave the English landscape its ‘wild majesty’. Today, Hampshire’s farmers and volunteers are honouring his legacy:

It was more than 230 years ago that the Rev Gilbert White became the first person to identify the chiffchaff, willow warbler and wood warbler as three distinct species. The Hampshire county parson was also the first to describe the harvest mouse and the noctule bat, and to tell of swifts mating in flight, something not recorded again until the 1930s. He was fascinated by his pet tortoise, Timothy, and why he needed so much sleep.... White spent his whole life in this valley, partly because people didn’t travel as much in those days, but also because he had a problem with coach sickness. He never travelled north of the Midlands, east of Essex or west of Devon.

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This is a fascinating article on his more or less contemporary Mary Delany, and her life before 'the famous “paper mosaicks”, or botanically accurate flower collages'

As a woman she might have been unable to be a member of formal intellectual clubs, such as the Dublin Society, but she read extensively and had a broad network of similarly-minded acquaintances, and these networks kept her firmly ensconced within the wider intellectual world. She was a member of the extended Bluestocking circle and also was closely connected to Irish intellectual circles – especially after her marriage to Patrick Delany. She expertly walked the tightrope between the possibilities and limitations afforded by her position as an elite woman, albeit one of relatively limited financial means, engaging with intellectual life while maintaining an image of irreproachable decorum that was grounded in her Protestant faith. In this way, she utilised the creative arts as a way to deepen her exploration of contemporary scientific and philosophic culture, which aligned with her religious convictions.

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Also about finding a space to be a female scholar, and outside the walls of a convent at that: How to be a Classical Scholar - and a Woman - in the Fifteenth Century:

Isotta’s expressions of modesty should therefore not be taken literally simply because she was a woman. Her own behavior reveals a woman who dared address famous scholars directly – far from the timid lady she often claimed to be. It is much more plausible (and surely a more feminist claim) that she has adapted the modesty trope to help her navigate her unique situation.

Isotta never married, although she rejected a proposal in 1453. Nor did she become a nun. Instead, she lived as an independent scholar in her family home, a very rare phenomenon for women of this period. Her singleness was probably what allowed her to continue her studies. In contrast, her younger sister Ginevra (1419–68), who had once corresponded with humanists just like Isotta, ceased all literary activity after her marriage. However, her unusual lifestyle placed her squarely in the public eye, making her an easy target for Plinius’ malicious attack.

Isotta fell silent for a period following the accusations, after which her circle of correspondents narrowed and her focus turned more to Christian texts from antiquity. There is an almost ten-year gap in her extant writings before she addressed a letter to a new Venetian governor, Ludovico Foscarini (1409–80). In this letter, she introduced herself as a woman who had turned her study from the profane to the sacred.

I recently averred, my dearios, that my research methodology is arcane, idiosyncratic, and uncommunicable, and probably unreplicable.

However, I realised today that (apart from the 'cites?' and the 'take down the references') I do have a research methodology.

It's called applying seat of pants to seat of chair and reading (may be books/articles, may be actual primary sources).

It does not consist of ringing people up and asking them wooly questions from a position of almost total ignorance.

(I will cut meedja people the teensiest amount of slack here, because I suppose this initial approach is also working for them as an audition to see if one can speak coherently and articulately on the topic in question.)

Admittedly I hate asking people for information in general - I really shrink from any project that might involve oral history - and felt a deep shudder of recognition when reading Mary McCarthy's Birds of America:

Except in the classroom and of people he already knew outside it, Peter loathed asking questions.... He had never outgrown the feeling that a quest for information was a series of manoeuvres in a game of espionage.

Even so, if you do Speak to Experts, the experts will be way chuffed if you indicate that you already know a modicum about the subject, even if it is by way of scholar whom they feel they no much better than. (Okay, I reserve the right to be snarky about people who bounce in being all about E- S- or T- L- and nothing else.)

Inspired by an exchange on one of my scholarly lists this morning in which someone said they were not intending reading new book on a particular subject because they'd already read previous works addressing it.

Excluding the possibility that a new work might, you know, bring something new to an existing debate...

And recognising that I am myself all too prone to groaning 'Not another book on [whatever]'...

Is it a badness?

I will stick to my guns that any book which claims to be making a revolutionary new case, apparently in ignorance, or deliberate neglect, of any preceding work of which there is a copious amount, is a book whose author I should like to introduce to Mr Codfish.

But a work that reignites attention to a particular topic or theme, and directs the reader to the debate of which it forms a part and the existing literature: can that be bad?

As I sometimes remark about new works of feminist polemic, been there, done that, but there are people who haven't, and providing the new work doesn't actually suppose that no-one ever thought that about the situation of women before, I'm cool with it, because I am probably not the intended audience. (Okay, I doubt I will ever not be unimpressed by some of the generalisations apropos of The Second Wave, which was whatever the opposite of a monolith is.)

There is always someone for whom this is their first encounter.

Some years back at Wiscon I made the point in discussion that in various Fail episodes, it wasn't so much about convincing the other side (and when you've done that, you could try getting water to run uphill) as getting those arguments out there for the unconvinced or the people who hadn't really thought about the issues at all.

I'm all about the realising that things have a history: but one of the things that history teaches us is that things don't happen once and for all, you have to keep having the arguments and the campaigns and the setbacks and the revivals and so on and so on.

In fact, it is like actual therapy as opposed to the Hollywood version in which the protag has *Huge Insight* and is instantly cured, rather than circling around and around the issues and approaching them from different angles and having them keep coming back.

Yes, it's the detailed deconstruction of the Freeman-Mead controversy, which I always feel Freeman basically cheated on in the first place by only starting it once Margaret Mead was safely dead. This book does nothing to change my feelings that Freeman's case was always a bit dodgy (different informants, different periods, different genders, and doubtless different questions asked - of course they were not going to have identical findings, but honestly, is it really the habit of experienced anthropologists to take as gospel what their male informants tell them a) about the virtuousness of their unmarried sisters and b) about their own sexual exploits? and assume that these automatically trump what girls themselves told someone else decades previously?).

Shankman reveals just how dodgy (and bizarrely obsessive, since he published two books about it) Freeman's case was. I didn't realise that his entire case was about tearing down only Coming of Age in Samoa, which Mead deliberately wrote as a popular account of her Samoa fieldwork (very much her anthropological apprenticeship), on which she also published a ethnographic field report which one gathers is as dry and professional as anyone might wish, and which he ignored. Also totally leaving out all her other, subsequent, work on different cultures, in museum anthropology, in syntheses, etc.

This book is not uncritically hagiographical about Mead and Coming of Age in Samoa, but on the whole, she comes out of this a great deal better than Freeman, including being open to listening to views she didn't agree with and even advocating for their hearing.

Vast swathes of Mead's career were not all Freeman left out in his critique. Shankman's micro-readings and comparisons indicate: selective quotation, misinterpretation of what he does quote, leaving out anything that might contradict his picture, and not giving anyone access to his sources, such as an interview with a very elderly Samoan woman who had been one of Mead's informants. I.e. it all looked very scholarly, and he made a big thing of how many sources he had consulted and FACTS he had ascertained, but it had shot off at some fairly extreme angle from the actual processes of academic argument and debate. For someone who made a big deal of how SCIENTIFIC he was, Freeman does seem to have rather ignored Popper's notions about falsifiability, in spite of frequently name-checking him.

It is clear that, at the very least, Freeman was a troubled man with a lot of problems. During his fieldwork in Sarawak there was some kind of weird episode involving Tom Harrisson, and in later years he was given to writing long letters to people who disagreed with him, including threats to destroy their careers in the discipline.

What he did vis-a-vis Mead, as Shankman states, was to create a good story which could be presented in a way that was attractive to the media (controversy!) even though right from the get-go fellow-anthropologists were more hesitant to accept Freeman's conclusions, or downright critical. His line intersected with concerns of the period in which he published his attack on Mead, and although it doesn't seem that there was actually a lot of difference between Mead's and Freeman's positions on the interactions of nature and culture, he presented her as a simplistic cultural determinist and made his position very attractive to biological determinism, which was having a serious resurgence at the time.

Shankman, whose area is also Samoa, is additionally interesting on changes in Samoan society between the time when Mead was working and when Freeman was, and in particular, examines the response of Samoans themselves to both anthropologists.

This is a very rich book - including Shankman's personal encounters with both Mead and Freeman, though as a junior colleage, indeed, his first meeting with Mead was as an undergraduate, in both cases. It's illuminating about that difference between how work is regarded by people in the field and non-experts (about which I have some striking examples myself that I could give, and have on occasion) and how certain works (both Mead's and Freeman's) became popular in specific historical contexts, and in particular the role of the media and being media-savvy.

Though on that point, there is an amusing bit of meta of which Shankman is obviously not aware in his citation of some contentions on sexuality in the Jazz Age from The Technology of Orgasm... which also has its moments of wild segues from possibility > likelihood > certainty in constructing its case.

I also wonder whether Shankman is possibly overlooking the attractions of attacks on a Powerful (and indeed sexy) Mother Figure and the feeding of misogynistic attitudes into the furore and the proliferation of the meme of Mead Wuz RONG.

Call for Papers: Feminism, Blogging, and the Historical Profession
Journal of Women’s History

The Journal of Women’s History invites submissions for a roundtable on the
emergence of blogging as a location for critical thought among women in
the historical profession; historians of women, gender, and sexuality; and
feminist scholars who may, or may not be, historians. Participants may
wish to address one or more of the following questions in an abstract of
no more than 250 words: What role does self-publishing on the internet
play in a profession where merit is defined by scholarly review and a
rigorous editorial process? What are the intellectual benefits, and/or
costs, of blogging? What are the ethics and consequences of blogging
under a pseudonym? What kinds of electronic acknowledgement already
correlate with established scholarly practices; which can be discarded;
and which need to be attended to, perhaps more rigorously than in printed
publications? If many scholarly publications and organizations have
already adopted blogs as a way of spreading news and inviting
conversation, is blogging itself developing rules and practices that will
inevitably produce intellectual and scholarly hierarchies similar to those
that blogging seeks to dismantle? Does feminist blogging offer particular
opportunities for enhanced conversation about race, sexuality, class, and
national paradigms, or does it tend to reproduce existing scholarly
paradigms and silences within feminist scholarship? Finally, are new
forms of colleagueship and scholarship emerging in the blogosphere?

The roundtable will consist of a short introduction, several essays of
2,000 to 3,000 words, and a concluding comment/response. Abstracts should
arrive no later than July 15, 2009, and can be submitted electronically to
Claire Potter at tenured.radical@gmail.com. Final submissions are due
October 1, 2009. Pseudonymous bloggers may publish under their
pseudonyms, but must be willing to reveal their identities to the editor
of the roundtable and the commenter. Bloggers based outside the United
States are particularly encouraged to contribute.

I feel that this is another of those attempts to grasp blogging that puts 'bloggers' into neat categories and their blogs ditto, just like the whole 'where are the feminist bloggers' thing.

Me, personally, myself, I feel that I am a blogger who happens to be a historian and scholar, rather than a historian or scholarly blogger. This may be a particularly LJ thing, but is surely far from unique and idiosyncratic.

I post about history and about research, but that's just part of what I write about here, and I don't feel any particular urge to hive off MI SRS HISTORIKL THORTS LET ME SHOW U THEM somewhere else (because anything of that nature is probably going to end up as a conference paper or article or chapter anyway, or if not, stuck on my website, the last refuge of stuff that doesn't readily fit into a publishable category).

But there maybe are people for whom this roundtable might be a useful and interesting venue

I know it's in the poorest of ton to quote compliments that people have made one, but this, from callunav was very thought-provoking and I don't think I can go into the thoughts that riffed off it without citing:

You demonstrate - habitually, maybe even casually - that it's entirely possible and useful to explore at least a part of a complicated issue, and that those explorations are not less meaningful for being necessarily incomplete.

Which led me to think of intellectual styles, and knowledge as painstakingly put-together jigsaw (or maybe a better metaphor would be reconstructing a mosaic of which you may not even have all the pieces) versus knowledge as aerial photograph.

I have the greatest respect for people who can do Big Picture really well, but too often (especially perhaps in the Grand History of Everything type of popular study) there is some 'key to all mythologies' theory that shapes and focuses the Big Picture.

Which is helpful when doing that sort of thing, but very prone to creating distortion.

There's a poem by Robert Graves, In Broken Images, which is so relevant I think I have to cite here in full:

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images,

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact,
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

I'm just so very doubtful that there's a Key to All Wisdom available, even if, once we have enough information on particular things, we might be able to discern patterns that might possibly be useful and productive.

On another hand, maybe 'just getting this corner of the mosaic/jigsaw sorted out' lacks ambition? It's certainly a strategy against being deterred by the immensity of the project. Rather like deliberately choosing to write something that is not e.g. The Great American Novel.

Knowing about other bits of the mosaic/jigsaw, rather than just one's own small corner, is undoubtedly helpful in the task. (At the very least, if you're writing on sewage reform in Bradford, 1830-1845, it might be useful to know what was happening in Leeds or Wakefield, and the content of contemporary parliamentary debates.)

So I realise I'm coming round here to the notion that Big Picture stuff is fine if it also has the sense that if you zoom in on a corner there would be complex stuff going on (George Eliot's metaphor of the drop of water and the microscope) and that the corner of the mosaic approach is best when it has that sense that one can zoom out and see where it fits in a bigger context.

One thing I do know: it's always more complicated.