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Karla Poewe's Blog
Meandering Thoughts: Berlin to Calgary to Zambia and back
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
Sunday, April 8, 2018
My Apprenticeship: Return from the field and changes in the Discipline
This blog shows two PowerPoint slides that move to the last Chapter of the book My Apprenticeship: An Intellectual Journey.
The last Chapter was published previously in Ethnos (1996).
Importantly, the last Chapter includes later research conducted in southern
Africa, the southeastern US, western Canada, parts of Germany and Britain. In
South Africa itself, both my husband Irving Hexham and I did field work and
life history interviews among charismatic Christians and among selected popular
writers who were Afrikaans and English speaking. As well, we conducted archival
research in the Berlin Mission for four months in 1995. In South Africa,
specifically in 1986, 1987, 1989, we did field work for four months each year.
My
approach to research became historical and global because of my reflection on
my first long field work in Zambia as described in this book.
The
two slides show that while I was deeply involved in my first fieldwork and the
initial publishing of my findings, the discipline of anthropology changed. Some
leading scholars asserted that “a new ideology was born.” I experienced a rude
awakening.
The
slide “Return from field and Changes in the Discipline” shows how Anthropology changed primarily, but
not solely, as a response to two significant, if also flawed, works – for
example, that of Edward Said and of Derek Freeman. Just as I started to
publish, it seemed as if Anthropology had made a 360 degree turn from an emphasis
on participant-observation and experiential knowledge to text-making rhetoric
and experimental writing. Like it or not, I had to address this change.
The
exercise led to many new insights of which the slide “An Example of Metonym as observed among Charismatic Christians” is
but one example. It all has to do with how language is used to convey the
reality of the believer’s experience to themselves and the listening
anthropologist. Although believers were not themselves aware of it, they used certain
figures of speech like metonym, for example, to interpret the happening of “resting
in the spirit.” Examine the slide carefully, or go to the book, or go back and
forth between the two and you will begin to understand what makes some
religious happenings real to those
who experience them in specific contexts.
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Tuesday, March 27, 2018
My Apprenticeship, Mental Geography, Researcher as System, and Questions
Below are some
diagrams that show the relationship between researcher, childhood memories and
environment. The first diagram schematizes the Mental Geography of the Researcher. Only those childhood
experiences of WWII and the Early Post-War years are shown that erupted during
my first fieldwork in the Lenda valley of Zambia. It should be noted that
during the years of assimilation to, and graduate education in, Canada and the
United States, personal memories were dormant. I was made aware, however, that
Germany was responsible for the Holocaust. The latter was not a personal experience;
rather, the experience was one of having been made aware of it as a teenager
and young adult in Canada and the United States. The book shows how all this
plays into the research.
The row below indicates
that Personal Memories Erupted first
in Zambia at specific times and on seeing Lenda nature, local makeshift
dwellings, experiencing close relationships, during border crossings, and on
observing the decadence in the southern part of the region. How all this
happened is of course the story of the book. Clearly, these memories generated
biases, but in the sense of both positive and negative ones. It is a topic that
is picked up again, along with others, in the Concluding Chapter of the book.
The next Diagram sketches
the Researcher as System always in relationship
with the Environment. The latter
consists of the research environment in Zambia, or what I called the Lenda
valley and, through correspondence, that of North America. The researcher as system consists of the
person doing the research and, while she is doing science, heeding what is happening
inside of her. The latter involves, of course, the use of faculties other than,
and in addition to, reason, for example, feeling, intuition, the imagination,
and so on. The reverse arrow is there to remind ourselves that all these
interactions during the research process have consequences, usually
unanticipated ones, and involve risk. Doing field work is a highly dynamic set
of activities and communications. The book does not analyze these so much as
show them.
PowerPoint Slides as guides to the book: My Apprenticeship |
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Monday, March 12, 2018
Three Kinds of Empathy
Three Kinds of Empathy
Although unintended, in My
Apprenticeship: An Intellectual Journey (2018) I highlight the struggle
between two antithetical personae: (1) the female refugee scholar, a figure
with a WW II past and the consequent vulnerabilities, biases, individualism,
changing perceptions, moments of despair but also what locals call her courage
and energy, and (2) the thorough researcher, objective, empirical, and
disciplined. It is this struggle that sharpened my sensitivities both to the
people I researched and to my inner life. It also made me rethink the meaning
of empathy.
Here I want to review
Lipps’ three kinds of empathy. We have all experienced them. What is
interesting is that one can experience each kind of empathy positively or
negatively.
(1) Empirical empathy occurs when
sounds of natural objects remind us of, for example, “howling” or “groaning.”
They can result in such metaphorical descriptions as “howling storm,” “groaning
trees,” which call forth similar feelings in the experiencing self and other.
Note the involvement of memory in matters of empathy.17 One
person, however, may experience “groaning trees” positively, the other negatively.
The reminder becomes more powerful, that is metonymic, when it is experienced
as, for example, the “groaning of all creation” or “the groaning” of the
spirit, as charismatic Christians in Africa and elsewhere might say.
(2) Mood empathy occurs, for
example, when color, music, art, conversation, and so on, call forth similar
feelings or moods in the researcher and researched. Thus, I experienced Herero
tunes as haunting, melancholy, and overall sad, which is what the Herero showed
and said they felt (Poewe 1985). It increased my understanding of their
culture, centered as it was on defeat and death, although it also distanced me
personally from them.
(3) Empathy for the sensible (in the
sense of perceptible) appearance of living beings occurs when we take
other people’s gestures, tones of voice, and other characteristics as
symptomatic of their inner life (Malinowski 1967). We can talk about
“appearance empathy” when we recognize, as in a flash, by a gesture, or something
external, the other’s inner life; when we know that it could be, but need not
be, part of our inner life. For example, this kind of empathy led to a real
breakthrough in my understanding of the Herero. It struck me that their dress
made a statement simultaneously about their superiority, sense of failure, and
self-protection. This was confirmed by subsequent research and discussions with
Herero women.
Note, while my
apprenticeship book is specifically about my first research in Zambia, in the
conclusion especially, I refer to subsequent research of Charismatic Christians
and the Herero of Namibia.
Thursday, March 8, 2018
What is Empathy?
What is
Empathy?
The
story of ethnography is like the story of Adam and Eve. We bit into the textual
apple of the tree of the knowledge of experience and rhetoric, and now there is
no going back…
Broadly
speaking, empathy is the ability to share in another’s emotions and feelings.
It is not, however, as it tends to
be defined in Webster’s dictionary, a matter of projecting one’s own
personality into the personality of another to understand him or her better. More frequently, the reverse is the case. Empathy has to do with the projection, in the sense of impact, of the
other’s personality and culture on one’s own. The other’s personality and
culture create a happening in the open-minded or receptive researcher that
requires thoughtful exploration…
The
meaning of empathy is in fact more complex than that given above. It is also
more than the expectation that the anthropologist be “an unmitigated nice guy”
with “extraordinary sensibility, an almost preternatural capacity to think,
feel and perceive like a native,” as Geertz would have it (1983:56). And while
I would contend that field work is a journey of discovery, it is not quite the
quest story as satirized and dismissed by Geertz (1988:44–45). Let us look at
empathy more closely.
According
to T. Lipps (1851–1914), empathy assumes
a common humanity. This assumption is quite the opposite of that of
reflexivity which depends on cultural differences and distance (even when none
exist or are of minor importance) and is concerned with intersubjective
meaning.
Empathetic
researchers can experience themselves, in some manner, in the other’s
experiences and vice versa. As I converse or interact with the other, the other
and/or I will recognize things in accord with our respective inclinations and
needs.
It is not the case, as is often
assumed, that experiencing oneself in the other’s experiences and vice versa
makes for identity. Nor is it the case
that the experience is necessarily positive to be empathetic.
Lipps
distinguished between positive empathy
or pleasure and negative empathy or
pain. Positive empathy refers to agreement between the stimulus
derived from interaction with the other and one’s inner activity. Negative
empathy occurs when the suggestions implied in the interaction conflict
with one’s inner self. “Inner activity” or “inner self” refer to the complex
activity which involves thought, feeling, intuition, sensation, imagination, and
suspected or unsuspected attitudes. In
other words, we use all human faculties to make sense of other (and self) and
then translate these into written, oral, or visual media—if that is what we
want to do.
[Reference: Poewe 2018: 304-307]
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