Us and Them

I am typing this in a Starbucks located within Chapters. Throughout my time at school I have assumed that everyone else has been on a similar page as me. I figured that the amount of schooling did not matter, as long as a conceptual basis was formed. This conceptual basis is created by living. I thought that two people, if they grow up in a similar location, can have a semi-intelligible conversation about things and not generally fall out of sync. My view of this was altered about four minutes ago when I learned that the world of pop-literature is generally unaware of things that are happening in my world of Cultural Anthropology. I came to this conclusion after finding the remote corner where Anthropology books are sold in this store.

For those of you who do not know what Chapters is, the best description that I can come up with is “book-megastore.” Chapters, a Canadian (and now I believe American owned) made company has become a staple in every small and large town that I have ever been to in British Columbia. Usually teamed up with an independently run Starbucks, Chapters is the place to be if you are in to reading. The selection of books at this store is phenomenal; everything from “New Age” mumbo jumbo to intriguing Physics publications are sold here.

In all honesty, I did not think that Chapters had an Anthropology section. In fact the way I chanced upon it was by asking a clerk whom I have seen working here ever since I can remember. I went up to the man, got his attention and asked: “Hi, uhh, I’m pretty sure this is not the case, but would you guys happen to have an Anthropology section?”

“Yes! Yes we do,” he replied enthusiastically, “it’s just over here.”

“Of course there are only about seven books in total,” He told me led me out of the science fiction section, past the magazine section at the other end of the store and through the bargain books section. “It’s right here, in the history section”

I snickered at this “History?” I asked with a sarcastic tone.

“Yes, history, right beside the cultural studies section,” which was also located under the huge label “HISTORY” in the far corner of the store.

I was beginning to understand what was happening. This man probably thought I was talking about the traditional definition of Anthropology! I am so used to just saying that I am an “Anthropology” student because the other forms of anthropology are usually titled as their own names where I go to school. Anthropology means “Socio/Cultural Anthropology” while you would add a word like “physical” if you were talking about Physical Anthropology and Archaeology is just known as Archaeology, and regarded as almost completely separate from Anthropology. In Simon Fraser University, Sociology and Anthropology are the same department, but Archaeology and the rest are different ones. Of course this is probably not that apparent to a man who has been working in a book store for as long as I can remember.

The clerk began to list off the different sections, “and here is Anthropology!” he exclaimed. The Anthropology subsection was located right beside the Queer Studies subsection which was right beside the Black Studies subsection.

“Oh!” I said to the man, “So the Anthropology section isn’t that shabby” as I browsed through the books in the “community and culture” subsection.

“No,” he said, as if I couldn’t read the label I was standing under, “Anthropology is only right here; that’s community and culture.”

I stared at him for a brief moment of indecision. What was I to do? Should I laugh (because he might be a sarcastic mastermind) or should I just look where he was telling me to look?

Shortly after my small chortle of “oh yes haha,” the clerk walked away to organize some other books in the Bargain section.

This man could not have known that I was referring to cultural anthropology when I asked him where the Anthropology section was. That is not the issue here however. The issue is that “community and culture” has segregated itself from “Anthropology.” He also told me that the Sociology section was in the same place as cultural studies. However, I failed locate one Sociology book so I think that they must have been sold out of those.

My dad used to always tell me about the alienation he suffered while going to school. He used to tell me about how he could not discuss things that interested him with non-school goers after a little while because his head went into outer space (he was in Psychology and Geology by the way). Maybe this is happening to me. I almost wanted to go up to that man and lecture him on what anthropology is! But I couldn’t do that of course.

A social dichotomy was created between that man and his wall of “HISTORY” and me. Anyone I know in anthropology would also chortle at my story, but there is a sad statement within this experience that I’m still exploring and unhappy about.

The part of this little incident that bugged me was that Cultural Anthropology is supposed to be a study of culture but it has played a part in alienating me from my own. I feel disjointed and out of place (though I think maybe I have always felt that way, just not on this level) in an area that I was sure that I had basically figured out.

And so the quest for understanding continues. I know now that spending all of my time up in the clouds (literally, if you don’t believe me look at photos of SFU) has caused me to become different from all the people who are on earth. And only after three years.

Prison Writing

I was recently reading an article by Kristin Bervig Valentine about how she supposedly liberated prisoner’s minds after hosting a creative writing class in a female prison in the United States. I enjoy the prospect of prison writing because there is seemingly much that goes on there to create a vast and exotic universe to the many readers who have never gone to prison. This can also help (as was stressed in the article) the writers become better people. Valintine also stresses how her writing class can offer more opportunities inmates who get let out of prison. I cannot grasp how a simple writing class can help inmates succeed in the world. After leaving the protective doors of a prison, doors in the real world close for these people. Simply writing her worries away won’t help when a woman leaves the prison to enter a world of non-opportunity.

This article has caused me to become very confused about what my job might be if I continue on in academics. What kind of impact can I possibly make? This article brought my hopes up for a brighter future of helping people and then threw them back onto the floor when I began to reflect on what was being left out. I realized that there was nothing that this little writing program can offer to an inmate besides a nice place to go when she is frustrated.

The reality outside the prison bars of poverty and petty crimes leading back to more prison time is a more common one than Valentine’s proposal of a better life outside of prison because of her writing class. Valentine describes the women in her classes as eager to express themselves in light of their experiences in prison. Her class was also offered as a privilege to inmates who could attend with the threat of this expressive experience being revoked. She was very adamant throughout the article about how effective her classes were (because a few of the girls got published and so on) but did not talk about the majority of students in her classes. There were no statistics about how well her students did after they left the prison system. What happened to them? Why was there no follow up study? This makes her essay inconclusive in my eyes. She has a point that this sort of mental healing through creativity is effective, but what does it actually do if someone ends up back in prison? I would also have liked to know how much money was being spent on her class to begin with. Could that money have been spent in a different and more effective way?

Valentine wanted to keep her job of course! Who would ridicule their own source of income? It would be very silly to put down your own very controversial job of advocating freedom of speech in a jail. I am going to look for responses to this article to figure out what other people have thought and I will add it to the bottom of this post if I find any.

There are so many questions whirring through my mind at this point. It is possible that some women were healed in ways that weren’t described in the paper. I definitely felt a healing presence in the PBS documentary “What I Want My Words to Do to You” by Eve Einsler. It seemed as if it was almost pacifying for the women to go to their writing classes (yes, this brings up a whole whack of other issues) and I cannot imagine a different process that would suffice as a way of coming to terms with life in prison. On the other hand, I have not seen any videos showcasing psychotherapy or even interprisoner therapy (the latter seemed to poke though in Einsler’s film) so I cannot make a good judgment about the relative effectiveness of this program.

This, like everything I post here, is a work in progress. Suggestions on readings and the like are welcome. As I explore different regions of this topic, I will post more about it.

Citation: Valentine, Kristin Bervig (2006) “Unlocking the Doors for Incarcerated Women Through Performance and Creative Writing” In Madison, D. Soyini and Judith Hamera (eds) 2006 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. pp. 309-324

A Motive to Celebrate

One of my classes this semester is at my school’s downtown campus. My class sometimes touches on performances done about the downtown eastside of Vancouver (which is an ethnographer magnet to say the least). We read literature and watch certain community plays about the homelessness and poverty in the area. When class ends I step outside onto the border between the downtown eastside and the business community. It is interesting to be immediately immersed into the very marginalized area that I have just been studying in a comfortable seat while drinking coffee. The experience of what I have just talked about in class is different than the one that I experience when I leave. What does this say for other more remote Ethnographies? What can what we have ‘brought back’ to our society really tell us about the people that were studied?

These questions became quite apparent to me as I was waiting for the bus one evening after class. My classmates and I had just watched a play (on DVD) that emphasized the strong and silent history of the downtown eastside. This play showed a number of different stories and attitudes about the street that I was standing on while waiting for the bus. I felt proud to live in such an interesting and exciting place and was excited to get on the bus and watch the various happenings of the 100 block of East Hastings (this block was of particular interest because it contains the most open display of downtown eastside culture).

The feelings that I had were soon extinguished as a homeless man came up to me and asked for change. I gave him the money I had in my pocket and after a “wow, thanks man… I got to get a place to stay tonight,” he was gone. A part of me wanted to talk to him. I wanted to yell, “Hey, I was just studying you guys in class! You seem very interesting. I’d like to talk to you!” but I couldn’t. That would have been really awkward. I in turn started to feel awkward and out of place. I felt bad for celebrating this area while I watched the man limp down the street towards the hotel area of Hastings. I thought about all the hardships and life threatening episodes this man must have had. Those three dollars were just going to be spent and nothing was going to improve.

Carnegie Center on the 100 block of the Downtown eastside.

I then remembered all of the things I have seen on this street at night; the overdosed people lying face down on the sidewalk (and sometimes literally in the gutter); the women screaming as loud as they could, running through the streets with their skeletal and bruised bodies thrashing around on the cement like fish; the crowded ally ways concealing people with their backs turned to the street while shooting up; the riot gates and vacant rotting buildings; the stilleto short skirts smiling at passing cars; skeletons with numbed expressions and paper bags. The only celebration was in the literature.

I had been deceived. This was not so much a place of rich history and culture as it was a place of indescribable complexity with far more sadness than happiness. In these streets, the only happiness that comes late at night while it’s raining and people huddle in door alcoves is through the crafty penmanship of someone who has never had to beg for change in order to sleep in a rat infested and moldy hotel.

What does this say about the ethnographic things that I have read? The only reason why I realized this flaw in ethnography was because I walked on the same street that I studied. The ethnographers that have studied the downtown eastside are not ignorant to these things. There is a choice made to celebrate things that one studies and this might me done unjustly. This experience has further alienated me from my studies in anthropology because it is becoming ever-more obvious that the objectives of research have personal goals laden within them.

Discussion:

In all fairness, however, it is impossible to be able to completely understand and even more impossible to transcribe the exact culture of a specific area; especially as an outsider. what I was trying to express was the difficulty I am having with the misrepresentations of certain descriptions of culture. I still think that there is a very interesting and unique culture in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, but sometimes the representations of such are misleading because certain areas are stressed too much. This causes other important descriptions needed to grasp a culture (at a very basic level) to be left out.

This raises another question which is not uncommon in anthropology: Who is the researcher representing? If the researcher is representing his/her personal goals, some problems arise. Things that are of little purpose to a culture may be over represented when the researcher makes evaluations. This will unavoidably lead to a different theoretical framework and a skewed overall tone of the finished product. This differs from concentrating on a function or process in itself within the framework of the culture because the researcher then has established boundaries in which to work while inevitably resorting to a general overview of the culture to explain what is going on.

Conversely, if the people being studied are too able to shape the research, then other things are being left out. I think it was Phillip Bordeaux who said something like ‘That which comes without saying, goes without saying.’ That is to say, things that a group of people regard as obvious and unnecessary to discuss often don’t talk about them (yeah, it’s not that deep). Therefore, it is up to the researcher to find the values and connotations of such things. My experience may have something to do with this principle as well. The people being researched may be interprited any way the researcher chooses in the end.

I will be adding to this post as I research more about methods and representation.