Delivered as the 2010 Presidential Lecture at Beloit College's Phi Beta Kappa Induction Ceremony
Sameness, Difference, and Renewal
As a person who has been around the block—the academic calendar—a few times, I cannot help but feel nostalgic as the calendar turns to March, April, and May. The renewal of springtime and the greening of even northern areas makes me think of the ways our lives are structured, timed, reconfigured, renewed…and remembered. Nowhere is this as true as in academia, where I spend most of my working life. Let's think about school, then. I'll use examples from college springtime, but only because my memory is a little rusty (aside from those dreams where I show up to the high school and have to finish "Senior Math" to graduate...usually in my pajamas). The examples work from kindergarten through medical school, so let's get started.
Some things stay the same. The warming of spring, the
rush to the end of the term, papers, finals, a brief (and often raucous)
punctuation of exuberance from Wednesday until Friday…and then the gear-up,
with families in tow, for graduation weekend—departmental receptions,
presidential gatherings, Phi Beta Kappa inductions, and the commencement
ceremonies on Sunday. All of these are remarkably persistent from year-to-year. Every year people take "final" exams in the spring. Every year people graduate. Every year family members from all over the countryside show up to celebrate with the graduates.
Yet some things are always different. The students themselves, the paths each has taken to garner enough credits for graduation, their papers and exams (these had better be different), and their individual reactions to the enormity of the occasions—all of these things change from year-to-year, and give a joyous particularity to the events of graduation.
Sameness, Difference, and Renewal
As a person who has been around the block—the academic calendar—a few times, I cannot help but feel nostalgic as the calendar turns to March, April, and May. The renewal of springtime and the greening of even northern areas makes me think of the ways our lives are structured, timed, reconfigured, renewed…and remembered. Nowhere is this as true as in academia, where I spend most of my working life. Let's think about school, then. I'll use examples from college springtime, but only because my memory is a little rusty (aside from those dreams where I show up to the high school and have to finish "Senior Math" to graduate...usually in my pajamas). The examples work from kindergarten through medical school, so let's get started.
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| [b] Structured history RF |
Yet some things are always different. The students themselves, the paths each has taken to garner enough credits for graduation, their papers and exams (these had better be different), and their individual reactions to the enormity of the occasions—all of these things change from year-to-year, and give a joyous particularity to the events of graduation.
This interplay of sameness and difference—the rhythmic blending of things that seem to endure and others that drift away as scattered moments in time—takes me back to my first day of graduate school in October 1987. That was the day I began to think about structure, history (or "event"), and culture. Part of the reason had to do with the anthropology professor I met for the first time that fall. Marshall Sahlins was focusing a great deal of his thinking (and writing and teaching) on the subject he called "structure and history." I would eventually take his seminar by that title, but this was a different course—a graduate introduction, as it were, to anthropological theory.
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| [c] Structured event RF |
As much as I would eventually learn about "structure and history" from Professor Sahlins, I was shocked into considering those matters the moment I looked at the syllabus for the course. A ten-week term lay ahead of me, with a little bit of "finals time" that gave me a total of seventy-five days. Seventy-five days for an ambitious course with many papers, lots of pressure, and...I double-checked the syllabus, just to be sure...ninety books.
Ninety. In real terms, I knew that I would have to work out a pace of about a book and a half a day to keep on-track. I thought about the structure of the term, and then about the way that I could approach it. I was already learning about structure, history, and culture, and Professor Sahlins hadn't even mentioned the words yet.
What I want to do with this series of posts is to engage these ideas and to push them in new directions that were not “covered in class.” Even in the seminar I eventually took called "Structure and History," Marshall Sahlins never discussed the bedrock (elementary?) issues and examples I am about to present, but I never could have developed them without his influence. What I am doing, in a way, is going back to the very beginnings of Sahlins's rich intellectual thread and trying to explain these ideas from the ground up. Sahlins has published a number of superb works that change the way we think about culture and change. What I am trying to do here is to walk through the very basic (and largely unexamined) "undergrowth" of his profound ideas.
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| [d] Like flight RF |
The Basic Ideas
Structure, history, and culture. It all begins with the give-and-take between sameness and difference that I mentioned above. Let us begin with an example that I have used repeatedly when I have explained these concepts to classes of mine (imagine that we are in class). Consider the table in front of me, and let us assume that I want to get from my side to the other side—closer to y’all, as we say (sometimes) back home. The table is a structure, and the movement I make to reach my goal (getting to the other side, like the chicken on the side of the road) is an event. Once it has happened, it is history, and by this definition, history is the array of things that happened to have happened—particular negotiations of structure that have everything to do with the individual predilections and peculiarities of individuals. And structures.
Right now, I am the peculiar individual, and I could choose from five basic options. I could go over it (leaping or crawling). I could scrunch down and crawl under it. I could move the table to the side, and walk forward, or I could simply walk to my left or my right and go around it. With any of those choices, I negotiate the structure and achieve my goal. Or not—it is not particularly difficult to imagine Professor Icarus catching a sole on the table and hurtling to earth. The table is the structure, and the event is what I happen to happen to do. Culture, in this schema, is the patterning of behavior and expectations. You might not think of going around a table as “culture,” but you already have a surprising number of shared assumptions about the matter right now. It is the reason you might very well chuckle if I crawled under the table, and the reason why the only “good” option for a middle-aged professor is to go around one side or the other. But you already knew that, and no one had to teach it to you. That's culture.
I like to think of structures as having three very basic
“levels.” There is nothing binding about
these characterizations, but they represent ways of framing the issues so that
the permeability of structures make more sense. Let's start with a series of images.
The first image—my dad, as a young boy, at the lake. When I was young—and at the lake—my father would tell me about his childhood dream of riding a bike as fast as he could from the road, across the lawn, and down the dock, then sailing through the air until he would gently descend to the water in a long, slow arc. I, too, imagined it until it was real for me. I could see it happening. It was then that he told me what really happened in his childhood negotiation of structure. He rode, flew down the dock, and went face first into the water the moment the front wheel left solid wood. He had not integrated gravity and several laws of physics into his imaginary equation.
The second image. Driving home from Madison yesterday, I took the Interstate, that vast river system that has crisscrossed the nation ever since the Eisenhower administration, complete with its network of oases and small river towns known as truck stops. Here’s the deal: the Interstate highway system is a structure, and life all around it is structured in ways you may or may not think about. Traffic (in structures called cars and trucks of various makes, models, and sizes) flows in two or three lanes, exiting and entering in methodical fashion not found on rural roads. It goes further, though. Traffic laws and speed limits are structures, too. If you drove to work or class today going nine miles over the speed limit (or four), you know exactly what I’m talking about. Even if you drove exactly the posted speed, you negotiated the structure. Some structures are just more malleable than others.
The third image. Students finishing their studies negotiate an entire series of structures in the last few weeks of the semester—all of which most people would call more flexible than the laws of physics or the structures of our biggest highway system. Try telling those same students, though, that their structures are so flexible they need not worry ("grading is subjective," we hear). Is that what you were thinking as you prepared your fourth grade report on the United Nations, your high school biology lab write-ups, or your upper-level seminar paper for your major? You did all of these things according to page limits, time constraints, and assignment guidelines. And you probably spent more than a little time wondering what constitutes the difference between an “A” and an “A-“ (or a B- and a C+) for various teachers.
In every case, we are “negotiating” structure. Let’s be sure, though, that we’re on the same page with the word negotiate. I don’t mean back room (or even front room) deal making. No cigars are required. I mean action. You are acting—right now, even. My father learned that he could dream and imagine and act all he wanted. The structures he negotiated were unforgiving (I call gravity a Level 1 structure). You might have found Interstate highways (Level 2a) or traffic laws (Level 2b) unforgiving, too, and I know that many students think that a professor with a red pen (Level 3 in my parlance) is the most unforgiving of all. Even Professor Redpaper, though, would agree that s/he is not gravity and those macroeconomic theory paper expectations are more flexible than the laws of nature.
This introduction to a complex topic and series on Round and Square is structured, too. Check in tomorrow for the rest of the (introductory) story.
The first image—my dad, as a young boy, at the lake. When I was young—and at the lake—my father would tell me about his childhood dream of riding a bike as fast as he could from the road, across the lawn, and down the dock, then sailing through the air until he would gently descend to the water in a long, slow arc. I, too, imagined it until it was real for me. I could see it happening. It was then that he told me what really happened in his childhood negotiation of structure. He rode, flew down the dock, and went face first into the water the moment the front wheel left solid wood. He had not integrated gravity and several laws of physics into his imaginary equation.
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| [f] Level Three RF |
The second image. Driving home from Madison yesterday, I took the Interstate, that vast river system that has crisscrossed the nation ever since the Eisenhower administration, complete with its network of oases and small river towns known as truck stops. Here’s the deal: the Interstate highway system is a structure, and life all around it is structured in ways you may or may not think about. Traffic (in structures called cars and trucks of various makes, models, and sizes) flows in two or three lanes, exiting and entering in methodical fashion not found on rural roads. It goes further, though. Traffic laws and speed limits are structures, too. If you drove to work or class today going nine miles over the speed limit (or four), you know exactly what I’m talking about. Even if you drove exactly the posted speed, you negotiated the structure. Some structures are just more malleable than others.
The third image. Students finishing their studies negotiate an entire series of structures in the last few weeks of the semester—all of which most people would call more flexible than the laws of physics or the structures of our biggest highway system. Try telling those same students, though, that their structures are so flexible they need not worry ("grading is subjective," we hear). Is that what you were thinking as you prepared your fourth grade report on the United Nations, your high school biology lab write-ups, or your upper-level seminar paper for your major? You did all of these things according to page limits, time constraints, and assignment guidelines. And you probably spent more than a little time wondering what constitutes the difference between an “A” and an “A-“ (or a B- and a C+) for various teachers.
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| [g] Structured conditions RF |
In every case, we are “negotiating” structure. Let’s be sure, though, that we’re on the same page with the word negotiate. I don’t mean back room (or even front room) deal making. No cigars are required. I mean action. You are acting—right now, even. My father learned that he could dream and imagine and act all he wanted. The structures he negotiated were unforgiving (I call gravity a Level 1 structure). You might have found Interstate highways (Level 2a) or traffic laws (Level 2b) unforgiving, too, and I know that many students think that a professor with a red pen (Level 3 in my parlance) is the most unforgiving of all. Even Professor Redpaper, though, would agree that s/he is not gravity and those macroeconomic theory paper expectations are more flexible than the laws of nature.
This introduction to a complex topic and series on Round and Square is structured, too. Check in tomorrow for the rest of the (introductory) story.
Notes
[1] Kwame Appiah, Thinking it Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), ix-x.
[2] I have used the outdated Descriptive Notation style for my chess examples, for
old-time’s sake.
Bibliography
Appiah, Kwame. Thinking it Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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| [h] Structure (and history and culture) RF |
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