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I think it is wrong to assume that all systems are as perfect in their functioning as you require them to be. Most systems are messy.

My circulatory system may be “messy”, but it is pretty systematic. Like I said, if you cut off my arm with a machete, then blood pressure will drop in a systematic relationship with the amount of blood lost. It operates according to a mathematical formula, in fact. Now, it’s not actually a perfect system, but not for the reasons you consider. That it’s wiring is weirdly arranged has little to do with it. It’s not a perfect system because there are other variables involved; if you cut off my arm, I will lose blood, but an immediate blood transfusion and an attempt to stop blood loss from the stump will negate the influence on blood pressure. Likewise if my heart failed and was replaced in function by an artificial pump.

The “whole”, or the “system”, actually reduces to a set of even more basic principles – fluid mechanics, in this case. It may be conveniently modelled as a system, however, knowing a small number of the variables allows you to make testable predictions about other parts of it.

The definition you’ve provided for “system” is quite accurate, but I honestly think you’re confused about it. The word “whole” isn’t a fuzzy word. It doesn’t mean “a bunch of stuff all in one place with some kind of connections”. The “whole” in the definition of systems is the same one we find in the definition of holism. And the onus is always on the believer in holism to show that the thing they describe cannot be reduced to its component parts. What you described in your post was nothing like a system, and if you see a real whole in there it’s because you’re imposing it on the data.

Your comments on my notion of ‘system’ are interesting and bring up a long-standing problem cultural anthropology: we see systems, patterns, assemblages (whatever the noun of the decade is) but also recognize that unless members of a lifeworld reflexively codify their culture and then use those codifications to regiment behavior, a lot of time we don’t see a super-tight ‘system’ of categories like the one you describe.

All this shows to me is that you don’t really know what the word “system” means. You’re trying to say that cultural “systems” aren’t systematic, but they are systems, which is a contradiction. If it’s sort of like a system, but the components aren’t systematically related, then it’s not a system. Why not give up this word? It doesn’t do anything at all. I’m pretty sure all this “system”-related talk in the social sciences is an attempt to get away from that scary word, reductionism, but as I don’t find reductionism all that scary, and as it is a much better view to take and is naturalistic in contrast to holism, I see no reason to embrace the systems-talk. Everything you described in your post reduced to the actions of a number of people.

To me, this is clear that it is part of the cultural system you are discussing — if it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t have that effect.

But it’s not a system. It reduces. And what it reduces to is a journalist getting the idea, after watching an early Michael Wood documentary and seeing that he’s quite handsome and well-dressed, that readers would find it funny to see this phrase applied to him. It reduces to the beliefs of a few people about the beliefs of other people, and those beliefs can be wrong. Wiki informs me that Kate Winslet was described by one newspaper as “sinking man’s crumpet”, after Titanic came out. Only one other paper used this comment afterwards. It failed to catch on. The beliefs of the journalist and their editors about the beliefs of others with regard to the humour of the phrase “sinking man’s crumpet” turned out to be incorrect.

It isn’t a system because it reduces to the individuals that make it up and their mental states. Those mental states are very often about what other people’s mental states are about, and people consider their beliefs about other people’s beliefs in their actions. That is what allows for us to make abstractions about “social facts” and “culture”. But make no mistake: “culture” is a useful abstraction, not a system. And what you have abstracted in your post is wrong, and about as reflective of modern British culture as Keanu Reeves’ accent in Bram Stoker’s Dracula is of British English.

Discuss White Privilege,

Your point about the “systematicity” of racism seems to rest on a different meaning of the word “system”, essentially a synonym of “inevitability”. In that sense, you may be right.

The physical bar for being a ‘thinking person’s crumpet’ will just not be the same for all racial groups. So of course whiteness matters.

Absolutely. And in trying to find out more about the phrase on the internet, I came across some comments about Moira Stuart’s appearance that were a little stunning – not explicitly racist, but simply implying that she’s not attractive, or never was. But she’s a good-looking, classy, intelligent woman with a lovely voice – there’s no reason she shouldn’t be considered “thinking man’s crumpet” if Anna Ford is, except for race.

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Historians? Biographers? The self-centeredness of anthropologists never ceases to amaze.

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But I totally agree that ethnography can stand out from general academia in a) clear commitment to individual voices (since psychologists turned quantitative, we seem to be the only one who uphold this committment) and b) appreciation (though not blindly) of emic categories. I have blogged about both issues in the past (if I may spam a bit): bit.ly/JQTjvC (on emic and etic) and http://bit.ly/GO6d9i (on taking individuals seriously). Thanks to your students for emphasising these issues, and to you for posting them…

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In the first week of class this quarter, I created a mini-homework assignment which directed students to the library to find an ethnography (a book) and briefly asses it based on a dozen or so questions; and then discuss their findings the next day in class. In my Intro to Cultural Anthro class, I found this was a useful way to have an immediate introduction to the texts that cultural anthropologists have traditionally produced. In response to the questions that I pose at the end of the list “Who do you think the intended audience of the book is? and “What do you think the purpose(s) of this book could be” I find they usually come up with some interesting perspectives.

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Rex: the pattern of your racist-sexist dismissal of my initial comment continues. While you directly addressed the substance of the two white male commenters’ responses, you could not–and continue not to–address the *substance* of mine. Instead, you just continue to fall back on the common racist and sexist pattern of dismissal and mockery that makes it clear to all, including the students you teach as a professor, that when one sees a person as a subordinate because of race and gender one does not have to bother to listen to or seriously consider anything the woman/person of color has to say, can summarily dismiss it, and should feel free to treat the person with contempt and disrespect. You have pretty much done the ‘polite’ white male anthropologist version of what Naomi Schaefer-Reilly did when she attacked black female scholars and Black Studies in her now-infamous Brainstorm post. As I am nothing but a silly little black girl droning on about race, I should be ‘put in my place’ so as to make clear I have nothing intelligent to say and nothing of possible academic/intellectual/scholarly imput. So why even bother to address the actual substance of my comment, querying the racial dimensions of whose does and does not get to be a thinking man or woman’s crumpet?

In dismissing my comment–and racistly and sexistly mocking me–you have made clear why anthropology is and continues to be ‘white public space’, and missed an opportunity to engage Al West on ‘the *systematicity* of (racial-sexual) preferences in relations of power’. Do you really think I am so stupid that I would post a comment so facile and fatuous that the entirety of its analytic impetus is ‘crumpets are a kind of white bread, and the English upper classes are white’? Of course you do, and that is the problem. What low regard you hold black women–and our intellectual capacities–in. Because your sarcastic dismissal was certainly not just about dismissing me as one annoying woman of color. Yes, systematicity.

To say that the existence of a few non-white women means that my query on the racial dimensions of sexual attraction/attractiveness in general, and ‘thinking people’s crumpets’ in particular, is baseless is a ridiculous assertion: and it is not very anthropological. It is also the height of hypocrisy in a post claiming to ‘unpack’ taken-for-granted cultural assumptions. Would you also say that the existence of Barack Obama means that racism no longer exists in the US?

What kind of substantive anthropological analysis (i.e. unpacking) is one actually engaged in when one can’t even do something as simple as (respectfully) acknowledge that there are racial dimensions to who gets to be a ‘thinking person’s crumpet’, that whiteness itself (or a non-white simulacrum thereof) might factor into who will and will not be perceived as a crumpet/strumpet/ thinking person’s crumpet? How hard is it to acknowledge that part of a white man’s being a ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ might in fact be the ways in which forms of white male status are factored into this determination (especially when pulchritude alone is not the deciding factor for attractiveness; and is it ever?; and how can one ever separate race and racial/racist logics from determinations of physical attractiveness?). The physical bar for being a ‘thinking person’s crumpet’ will just not be the same for all racial groups. So of course whiteness matters.

Your (non)response to and dismissiveness of my comment was racist and sexist and disrespectful. It was also a de facto form of white male bullying that should be called out for what it is. The point was to publicly mock me and to let me know that you do not regard me as an equal because of my race and gender. Your intention was to demean me. Not acceptable. And a terrible example for an anthropology professor–a teacher–to set. You owe me an apology, though I will not be holding my breath for it to come.http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/when-the-apology-makes-it-worse/257820/

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In dismissing my comment–and racistly and sexistly mocking me–you have made clear why anthropology is and continues to be ‘white public space’, and missed an opportunity to engage Al West on ‘the *systematicity* of (racial-sexual) preferences in relations of power’. Do you really think I am so stupid that I would post a comment so facile and fatuous that the entirety of its analytic impetus is “crumpets are a kind of white bread, and the English upper classes are white”? Of course you do, and that is the problem. What low regard you hold black women–and our intellectual capacities in. Because your sarcastic dismissal was certainly not just about dismissing me as one annoying woman of color. Yes, systematicity.

To say that the existence of a few non-white women means that my query on the racial dimensions of sexual attraction/attractiveness in general, and ‘thinking people’s crumpets’ in particular, is baseless is a ridiculous assertion: and it is not very anthropological. It is also the height of hypocrisy in a post claiming to ‘unpack’ taken-for-granted cultural assumptions. Would you also say that the existence of Barack Obama means that racism no longer exists in the US.

What kind of substantive anthropological analysis (i.e. unpacking) is one actually engaged in when one can’t even do something as simple as (respectfully) acknowledge that there are facial dimensions to who gets to be a ‘thinking person’s crumpet’, that whiteness itself (or a non-white simulacrum thereof) might factor into who will and will not be perceived as a crumpet/strumpet/ thinking person’s crumpet? How hard is it to acknowledge that part of a man’s being a ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ might in fact be the ways in which forms of white male status are factored into this determination (especially when pulchritude alone is not the deciding factor for attractiveness; and is it ever?; and how can one ever deprecate race and racial/racist logics from determinations of physical attractiveness?). The physical bar for being a ‘thinking person’s crumpet’ will just not be the same for all racial groups. So of course whiteness matters.

Your (non)response to and dismissiveness of my comment was racist and sexist and disrespectful. It was also a de facto form of white male bullying that should be called out for what it is. The point was to publicly mock me and to let me know that you do not regard me as an equal because of my race and gender. Your intention was to demeanme. Not acceptable. And a terrible example for an anthropology professor–a teacher–to set. You owe me an apology, though I will not be holding my breath for it to come. http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/when-the-apology-makes-it-worse/257820/

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I’ve never thought this was a problem related to cultural data or to anthropology’s method of interpreting it.

In this respect you are, I suspect, typical. You are quite correct to point to a

a whole cottage industry in anthropology that worries over interpretive excesses

but can you say that its worries have been taken seriously? My impression that they haven’t been is admittedly based on personal impressions, not systematically collected data. But since our conclusions can be no stronger than the data on which we base them, I’d like to see some if you have it.

Meanwhile, let me offer a few frankly speculative conjectures, based on my reading of classic and later, mostly British, social anthropology.

(1) Malinowski and other authors of classic monographs were acutely aware of the difficulties of interpretation. Their standard critique of Tylor and Frazer, et al, was that they imposed conjecture on fragmentary data torn out of interpretive contrast, resulting in what Evans-Pritchard labeled “If I were a horse” stories.

(2) The structural-functionalist embrace of Durkheim’s “social facts” was, in a way with important implications for fieldwork practice, a way of distinguishing the social, what everyone seemed to say and do and the visible structuring of spaces (homes, palaces, temples, villages, cities) within which they said and did it, from the personal (the private feelings of the unformed child, the village idiot, the women, or others), discovered in behavior or comments that appeared to be idiosyncratic. The social was defined as the domain of anthropology; that other stuff left to the psychologists and psychoanalysts.

(3) The result was a practice in which cross-checking with multiple informants and sifting through data to separate the essential from the accident were standard procedures. All perfectly consistent with humanistic scholarship articulated and argued in terms of Aristotlean/Thomistic logic.

(4) The world changes. The grand stereotypes embodied in classic theory are challenged on both moral and empirical grounds. Morally because it is no longer seen as proper to exclude the voices of the children, the women and others regarded as minors and dependents and lacking the authority to make definitive pronouncements, empirically because growing concern for subjectivity and agency shift the focus of analysis from social facts (the stuff that everyone is supposed to take for granted) to individual opinions and choices shifts the analytic focus from generic similarities to the range and distribution of individual variation.

(5) Here, however, anthropology confronts a problem shared with other humanistic disciplines. A solid majority of its practitioners hated math in school, have found all sorts of snarky reasons for denigrating statistics good excuses for their ignorance, and, thus, lack the technical know-how to address individual variation in anything but an impressionistic and moralistic manner in which what informant X happened to tell me on a day I was paying attention is conflated with an interpretation of “CULTURE,” of which informant X, for no demonstrated reason, is taken to be typical.

(6) The result can sometimes be the production of deeply moving stories. Take, for example, Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman. The writing is gripping and thought-provoking. But in what sense is Behar’s Mexican friend typical of any category to which we might assign her? To see her as typical of women oppressed by poverty and the macho habits of the men in her life is probably not wrong. But her toughness? The initiative she demonstrates in forming and maintaining a relationship with Behar? Are these generic features of her type or exemplary features of a response to a rare and idiosyncratic response to the hardships that shape her life? We shall never know until someone does a study of a population of individuals like her to see if she lies close to the mean or represents an outlier in the distributions of the qualities we think that we see in her.

In sum, the breakdown of the classic division between social fact and personal idiosyncrasy that enabled anthropologists of earlier generations to sort through their data and focus their attention only on the common features of “society” or “culture” breaks down when subjectivity and agency are concerns. It’s time to stop whinging and moaning or simply asserting the superiority of our trained intuitions and develop methods appropriate for addressing our new concerns in a serious manner.

That’s my take on where we are. Others closer to the game should be able to show me where I’m wrong. In a scientific spirit of openness to falsification, I await your comments.

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Your comments on my notion of ‘system’ are interesting and bring up a long-standing problem cultural anthropology: we see systems, patterns, assemblages (whatever the noun of the decade is) but also recognize that unless members of a lifeworld reflexively codify their culture and then use those codifications to regiment behavior, a lot of time we don’t see a super-tight ‘system’ of categories like the one you describe. Its for this reason that some of the typologizing excesses of the Goodenough/Frake era were replaced in the eighties (as I said above) by work by authors like Sahlins and Bourdieu.

In fact, culture is less like a computer program than it is like your circulatory system: “a set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole” (this is literally the definition of ‘system’). This doesn’t mean that the parts are clearly, neatly structured according to some plan. Your circulatory system is a result of history, extremely untidy, branches out in all sorts of directions, and works surprisingly poorly. Often the wiring is simply wrong: 8 out of every 1,000 children are born with malformed hearts (!) and contemporary medical imaging is so good that it reveals that no one has a ‘normal’ circulatory system the way you learn in medical books. In sum, I think it is wrong to assume that all systems are as perfect in their functioning as you require them to be. Most systems are messy.

You say that the line “thinking woman’s crumpet” is a deliberate anachronism which is used ‘for effect’. To me, this is clear that it is part of the cultural system you are discussing — if it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t have that effect. There is a reason that no one describes Michael Wood as “the squatting woman’s camera”.

At any rate, your fellow Brits have already demonstrated that your dynamic cultural system continues to transform: In the most interesting comments on this post, it turns out Moira Stuart and Konnie Huq _are_ crumpet.

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Or would they? Like many peoples, the British often draw metaphors between people and food, and in the metaphor hunger for the food is equated with sexual desire (an anthropologist would describe both of these as ‘appetitive longing’).

That was the part to which I was referring with my hyperbole. It wasn’t intended to be serious – only a parody of an ill-informed post. It’s okay to be ill-informed about something you’re not professionally interested in. All I intended to show was that your summary of Britain through the crumpet lens was about as well-informed as my drivel about Sarah Palin. It was also an unserious take on a series of old tropes, distorted. The fact that you critiqued it for accuracy is interesting.

I wonder, do you take this attitude with your informants? You really don’t seem to know much about Britain – you admitted as much! And that’s fine, as it really isn’t all that interesting. But you could have tried asking instead of pontificating about how our society really is and how the different bits of it connect together.

Systems may be historical – of course they are – but what we’ve got here is not a system. Systems operate by laws; they are systematic. What affects one part of a system necessarily affects all others parts, or else it isn’t a system. And with “crumpets”, we’ve got a few scattered references and a general tendency towards pale-ish white women with Oxbridge degrees on telly being called “thinking man’s crumpet” by some sections of the public and/or media. It’s not systematic at all.

Does culture operate by laws other than the laws of physics? I don’t think so. It’s not a system. My circulatory system is a system; if my heart fails then the whole thing stops, and if my arm gets lopped off then there will be a systematic drop in blood pressure as I lose blood. That’s a system. Systems are inevitable, but people have very complex brains susceptible to an enormous number of variables. If there is a system there, it isn’t obvious or “unpackable” by some freewheeling anthropology method. Of course there are connections between different things in human societies, and they are in some sense inevitable (discussions of free will aside), but there aren’t any systems of the kind you described in your post.

And the very thing that piqued your interest, the comment about Michael Wood being the “thinking woman’s crumpet”, was a deliberate anachronism, playing on the familiar (because old) description of certain women in the 1960s and 70s for effect. It has no systematic relationship to anything very much, let alone the complex “system” you described. My comment wasn’t that the system is “caked in history”. It was intended to convey the fact that the “system” you have elucidated was nothing more than historical residue, playing on familiar, out-dated tropes for humourous effect.

It’s hard for me to say as a cultural outsider and non-expert, but I think that calling a woman ‘crumpet’ evokes a wide range of associations: just as a crumpet is not a proper, nutritious meal, crumpets are not properly modest women; watching a crumpet on TV, like eating a crumpet, is a sort of cheap fullfilment — perhaps a guilt pleasure? Do working class people eat crumpet while upper class people eat some other sort of griddle cake? Its hard to say.

I hope you can read this paragraph and see why Brits might have a problem with your post.

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