A long response to a long post (and a little more below than we’ve talked about before, @Alberto) I like your take on anthropology’s value (and I laughed aloud at this part: a “hypothesis-testing researcher” is, to ethnographer, some kind of epistemological fascist."). As well as the kind of language we use vs what your supervisor would approve of.
I’m particularly interested in the distinction between the way economists have conventionally conceived of individuals and their choices and network science’s. If you remember, one of the key questions we’ve been working through in Open Care involves this tension between the individual as an autonomous, thinking agent and the individual as an inextricable part of a community, who is nothing without other people.
This tension is something we grapple with in anthropology a lot. Anthropologists are not psychologists— we do not, as a rule, take the individual and their inner mental states as units of analysis. Instead, you’ll most commonly hear anthropologists say they study culture, communities, social groups (though psychology is important and we do draw on it). But really (as you touch on in your post) we study individuals AS community members— people who are constantly shaped by and shaping their human-saturated worlds. And they make hopelessly irrational decisions! But our premise, I think, is that human behaviour makes sense, if you’re looking hard enough and pulling in evidence from the different sources that you mention (if you’re engaging in deep hanging out with informants, if you have familiarized yourself with their history, with their economic condition, with their religious beliefs and how they apply them, and so on).
All this to say: I think that a useful question for us to pursue is how seeming individuals, with their own usernames and own experiences in the world, come together to form an Open Care community and get stuff done. What is this balance between the power of the individual to forge ahead and create solutions to problems they see in their world, and their dependency on a larger community (which, for most people, is a source of great joy)? I think one of the greatest potential contributions of our mixed methods is to put forth a richer picture of human decision-making processes as individuals IN a community, instead of seeing human actors as isolated units or as faceless members of a mass.
When I was at UCL I did a three month ethnography of a London household (5 young professionals living together in a flat). My goal was to study their communication patterns and their usage of digital technologies. It was good fun— I had them keep a digital diary for a week of every single communication they had, and discussed it with them via interviews. They also let me run some analytics on their social media and their email to generate maps of their social networks.
But I did something else as well. I sat down with them, gave them a piece of paper, and asked them to draw their social network for me. They reacted with a combination of amusement and horror! But after busily sketching with coloured pencils, we had a few long conversations about why they drew their social worlds the way they did. And then we compared it to the maps generated by the software (MIT’s immersion software and wolfram alpha’s facebook report, for those interested).
I learned some really fascinating things. To take one short example: from looking at the network map, it appeared that Raoul had a really close relationship with his sister---- they communicated across digital mediums very intensively. When I brought that up with him he laughed and said “No, we can’t stand each other! But it’s mum and dad’s 30th wedding anniversary this year and we’ve been tasked with throwing this huge party.” Time after time it became clear that if I’d relied only on the mapping to draw conclusions about these people’s social worlds, I’d be hopelessly incorrect. Win for ethnography, on the outset.
But another thing became very clear to me throughout this experience. Without these larger-scale maps of their social worlds, there are a thousand questions I wouldn’t have known to ask. I couldn’t have asked Raoul about his sister— I wouldn’t have known about their intensive communication. I wouldn’t have been able to find out that Sarah still has extended, intimate conversations with a group of friends totally unconnected from her main network, a group of Harry Potter fans she met online when she was 12 and has been talking to ever since, despite only having met in person one time. All of these constellations were illuminated through even the limited amount of network analysis available to me, and they lit up my ethnography.
Each of these individual stories has a life and character, and it offers a depth of knowledge unmatchable by more zoomed out studies. Once, a colleague and I were delivering a paper survey about health and social care services in our London borough when we were gently interrupted by a mother and her 23-year-old daughter, who was mobility impaired and had a learning disability. Elizabeth (my colleague) began to ask the mother the questions about housing needs in the city, and the mother responds “well, our housing completely depends on my daughter!” Elizabeth looked at the survey and then back up at the mother, and instead set it down to have an extended conversation with the two of them about resources for disabled youth. The daughter articulated that as a 23-year-old, she feels like she falls through the cracks. She has limited interactions with people her age and struggles to find spaces, now that she is out of school and doesn’t fit the category of child, that meet her social and educational needs. We chatted with them for an hour, gaining a robust idea of this intersectional problem from these two knowledgeable individuals.
She is an expert in her own world, and her contribution is overwhelmingly significant in terms of making an impact despite the fact that she is just one person. In the same way, each Open Carer’s story matters as a piece of evidence— deep, rich, informative. The Street Nurses know so much about homelessness in Brussels. Alex knows so much about helping refugees in Calais. They tell us what life looks like over there.
But we also theorise that together they can tell us even more. Alex in Calais talks to Aravella in Greece and we see more of the picture. Maybe it’s like the old metaphor of an elephant up close— Alex can see the trunk, Aravella can see the tail. The more people we talk to, the more of the elephant starts to come into view. The more we can make out its shape and understand what it is as a bigger thing. Maybe then we know how to…uh…move the elephant? ok the metaphor is failing me here, but you see where I’m going. We understand something bigger by stitching together these worldviews and stories, and we can mobilise. Stories are not just stories of, they are stories for.
Marilyn Strathern once said that no one lives a generalised life. And at the same time none of us lives life alone. We grew up in a culture, with other people, and we move through a saturated world. As anthropologists we hold these two things in the balance — that we are constellations of individuals knit together, who move between the general and particular to make sense of our lives every day.
Here’s my hope. That because Bridget and Yannick and Brady and Alex have talked about art and mental health, some policy maker somewhere will see a connection that they didn’t before and build resources in their city that they otherwise wouldn’t have. Or maybe an international art initiative will take place, lead by these people. Or maybe a group of people will walk away from the conversation they had on the platform enriched with new ideas, or emboldened to make their world better. The form doesn’t matter much. The point is that something was made visible and shared. We saw what it looked like from somewhere else, and we learned.