Hotels are tidal pools. Staying at the Westin hotel in Kansas City, I saw the tide come twice. (One of these days, someone will do a portrait of America based on lobby ethnography alone. I am deeply happy to say it won’t be me.)

The first was the Jack and Jill Association of America. The Westin lobby and elevators filled with magnificently dressed and appointed women. It was from their patient, disengaged, short suffering husbands at the bar that I got the details. Jack and Jill is designed to help African American families stay in touch with their roots, and one another, as prosperity takes them to the suburb.

One of the pressing questions: how to keep kids in touch with their culture even as they are firewalled against the siren call of the gangsta pose (and posse). It sounds like a tough piece of parenting. Suburban kids may well be vulnerable to the accusation that they have compromised their blackness. What better way to redress the balance than hip hop swagger (and swag)?

This task will be complicated, I’m guessing, by a collision of consumption styles. The move to the suburbs is traditionally a move towards a consumption style that is muted. Kids find this cautious and uninteresting in any case. But it must be stupefying compared to bling. What happens when bland meets bling?

The second was the FBI National Academy. A different crowd entirely. Now it was husbands who were the key actors, and wives who sat patiently in the bar. The Academy was originally known as the “Police Training School of the FBI” and it is designed to help Police Chiefs improve their law enforcement methods.

One of the pressing questions: what to do about methamphetamines? One Academy guy was kind enough to give me a detailed account. Methamphetamines are apparently cheap to make and they can be manufactured in rudimentary facilities by people who have no real training. Finally, they can be manufactured in the US. On all these counts, closing down distribution is tough.

Addiction is formidable, much more formidable than cocaine, with recovery programs taking several weeks. Addicts sign on for the long term. Criminals high on methamphetamines are exceedingly dangerous, so they are difficult and dangerous to collar.

Abundant supply has not lowered prices very much, and interestingly, one of the chief sources of income for the methamphetamine addict is identity theft. This is less violent than street crime, clearly, but the consequences for the victim are still severe. It can take people years to sort out the blot on their credit history. (Is this symmetry? Addicts give their identities to a drug and take identities from victims.)

This is another symptom of our dynamism. Intoxicants come and go: heroin, marijuana, angel dust, cocaine, crack cocaine, and now methamphetamine. It is as if we are seeing a disintermediation even here. Production and distribution is now decentralized. In any case, the Academy is dealing with wave after wave of new drugs, lots of different drugs, and they must come up with new solutions for each of them. So much for the small town sheriff who mostly had to deal with a handful of drunks and a couple of punks. Thank God for the FBI National Academy.

There is not much in common here, except that both groups are dealing with the effects of dynamism. They come to the Kansas City Westin to learn to manage change. They come to learn to live with a continually changing problem set. They can’t expect simple answers, just make shift solutions. And they are not here for stately deliberation. They are grappling with problems that demand that they respond in real time right now. The response will be fleeting. Before next year’s convention, the world and the challenge will have changed again.

The thing I like most about real tidal pools is that they are so easy to think. The ocean has given you a little aquarium, one star fish, a handful of barnacles, a minnow, some things that dart, some things that skim. Finally, you think to yourself, an ocean made manageable. This I can think. I am guessing that these two conventions gave their participants a ‘tidal pool” moment. But, living in a culture of constant turmoil, they can’t have had any doubts. They know that respite is fleeting and that next year they are going to have to do it all over again.

1.  First thing this morning in the hotel lobby, I am standing beside a little girl and her mom.  The mom looks just plain exhausted by life and, to judge by appearances, she was not the brightest spark to begin with.  Her little girl, about 9, is staring out a window.

"Mom?”"

"What?”"

"The Western Auto sign.”"

"Yeah?”"

"It’s more right when it’s off than when it’’s on.”"

Her mother stares at her dully.

"At night, when it’’s lit up, two letters are missing.”"

Her mother stares at her dully.

"What do you know?” I think to myself, "one of the smart ones."”

I felt I should reward this splendid little observation.

"Hey, that’’s pretty smart.”"

The little girl beams and rocks up on her toes with pleasure: finally someone gets that she gets it.

2.  Later in the day, I go to interview a man who is 50-something and living in a suburban home.  He is cautious, articulate, smart, and not very forthcoming.  We sit at his dining room table.  The chairs are elaborately carved and upholstered in faux leopard skin.  There is a very large curio beside us filled with old fashioned glass wear.  Behind me is an immense African mask of great sculptural authority.  Virtually all of the art is ancient Egyptian in theme, the sort of thing we have from Pharaoh’’s tombs.  Behind the couch in the living room is a set of golf clubs. 

3.  Still later in the day, I go to another interview.  My taxi driver is suspicious of the neighborhood and the house before which we now sit.  The latter is immense with a vast stone foundation and 3 stories of badly painted wood, the architecture originally stolid but grand.  A hundred years of neglect has put paid to the grandeur.  The place now has an embarrassed air of a gentleman who catches you catching him in diminished circumstances.  This place has "urban decay"” written all over it. 

The cabbie says, "I’’m going to wait here till they open the door.  Come back if you want.  Run if you have to.”" 

I climb the stairs.  The big door opens as if the Munsters have been expecting me.  Standing there was a woman dressed entirely, head to toe, in white.  On her head is a kind of turban and in the middle of the turban was a badge of some kind.  I do not run down the stairs, but for a moment I wrestle with the idea that this might be a tremendously good idea. 

"Come in,"” she says without smiling.  As the door closes, I hear the taxi pull away. 

I take these data points as proof that America is the greatest country on the face of the earth. 

The suburban dweller is an African American man who accepts and now lives the Black Athena argument.  Some of us in the academy are inclined to mock this argument as identity construction of the most revisionist and community aggrandizing kind.  But I am sure you would not want to tell my respondent this, —not because he is a tough guy, though he looks like a pretty tough guy, —but because he is fully formed and fully credible and not by any stretch of the imagination a mere visitor at the all-you-can-eat smörgåsbord of American spirituality.  This guy lives Black Athena.  It works for him.  It makes this world make sense.  See what you will about the book.  This is the life.

The women in white proves to be—and this was of course my first guess—a classical yoga devotee with an MBA in accounting.  This big house is a place that she teaches spiritual development and her husband practices an alternative medicine.  She proves to be lucid, calm, interesting and quietly revelational. 

Both these people have put down roots in ideas that were, 20 years ago, so fringe, at least in America, they did not give real purchase.  You could not live them.  Twenty years later, Black Athena and classical yoga are habitable worlds, fully realized, fully scripted, fully furnished and capacious; —mobile homes, perhaps, but homes all the same. 

This is an America culture that is first extensive, adding new cultural space, and then intensive, working this space till people can actually live there.  At first, the space is so new and untried, it sustains only pioneers.  But in a very short time (and this is in ethnographic scheme of things, time-lapse rapidity) the space attracts and sustains settlers.  And eventually, the space sustains people who can’’t imagine living any other way; it is now a fully formed world unto itself.  People in Kansas may not get my haircut (see last post) but that’’s because some of them are busy with innovations of their own.      

The little girl.  She’’s the wild card, isn’’t she?  There’’s a good chance that she goes to a school so bad that there is no system in place to spot, engage, and advance her talent.  Kids half as smart will get twice the resources.  She will always been smarter than her mom and smarter than the worst of her biographical alternatives.  But that’’s not good enough, is it?  And here America very suddenly ceases to look like the greatest country on the face of the earth.   

References

Bernal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.  New York: Rutgers University Press. 

The image is "Evening view" by the Japanese commercial artist Shinsui.

Boy, is my hair wrong for this assignment.

I have really, really short hair. When the Hollywood studio heads got scalped, I knew it was only a matter of time before I followed suit. In matters of personal grooming, Jeffrey Katzenberg, above, is my God.

But short hair doesn’t work here in Kansas City. Matrons are giving me a wide berth at the mall. Kids stare at me. Security guards are giving me hard stares. This hair cut worked ok in Boston and Seattle but here it is some kind of flag of protest, or confession of imbalance. Let’s keep an eye on this one, the locals say. Plainly, he’s a nut bar.

It reminds me of research in Shanghai about 10 years ago. Every time I turned around, I would catch a woman checking me out. In this case, the object of their attention was my clothing. Shanghai was once and is once more the style center of China. Women there are happy to gather fashion news from any source, even a slightly geeky Westerner. I was happy to be a “diffusion agent.” They also serve, who merely get dressed and go out. And frankly Shanghai is one of the few places on the planet where an anthropologist can serve at all.

But in Kansas City, I am apparently too far ahead of the curve, too “out there.” This is not the Shanghai of America but the Cheng Du, happy to wait a little longer to get the news. Here my Hollywod hair is just plain odd.

For God sake, someone tell Jeffrey.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. 

I haven’t posted the last couple of days because I am in Seattle and doing ethnographic interviews.  The project is for a capital markets company and the objective is to see why people invest in mutual funds.

I can’t remember a project more fatiguing than this.  I am so tired I can hardly see.  For some reason, the interviews take everything I’ve got and then some.  I end up in that state where you find yourself wondering whether you can make it from the hotel lobby to your room without having to sit down for an hour or two.

The interviews are free wheeling and designed to be as opportunistic as possible.  At this point, the client doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, as it were.  At this point, it isn’t sure what to ask.  This is when you send in the anthropologist.  My job is to listen carefully and see the basic terms of references with which an investor sees themselves, their world, and investing.

So every question casts the net wide.  Let’s see what they say.  And follow up.  Let’s be prepared to go where they take us.  Let’s let the respondent design the interview so that we capture how they see the world, and not how the anthropologist or the client imagines they see the world.

Once the interview and the respondent is launched, I greet each question with the Letterman-Schaeffer question: Is this remark something or is it nothing.  The trick is to find the frame that makes it something…if you can.  I am asking myself, "what do I have to think to see the point of this?  Where can this answer take me?  What view corridors does it open up?  Does it allow me to see into the world of assumptions and beliefs that make this world make sense?  As I say, the trick is to shuffle interpretive frames fast enough to ‘hear’ what I’ve have just been told, before the rules of conversation oblige me to ask another question."

Ok, let’s say it is something.  Now I have to decide which follow-up question will open the something up.  I have a thought about where this might take us.  But I can’t flat out ask.  Because the second rule of this method is: never supply terms of reference.  If I give the respondent a way to fashion their response, they may well use it.  Then the interview has become a kind of mirror.  In a sense, I am listening to myself. 

So, I ask something that encourages them to keep going and suggest in a non directive way which way to go.  Sometimes, the thing dies.  But sometimes we are away to the races.  We have a gusher.  The respondent has let me into the way they see the world.  My job now: write like a demon.

Eventually, the interview begins to fill up with key terms and the interpretive possibilities.  I want to be as precise as I can about what these are, without being so precise that I am foreclosing my opportunity to see new definitions and relationships.  I end up with a large contingency table.  All these things may go together like this, or this, or this.  And more data is pouring in.  And the set changes as I entertain, promote or abandon my interpretive frames.

There are mechanics to keep track of in all of this.  Where are we in the interview?  Have I covered all the possibilities raised by this particular answer?  Have I covered all the things I must ask about in the course of the interview.  Given this respondent, and these answers, what is the best way to get these questions in?  How should they be phrased and in what order?

It ends up being a little like air traffic control except that you have to keep reshuffling the stack even as you wonder whether you have correctly posited the principles of lift and flight that apply in this particular air space.

Yesterday, I had two quite different interviews.  The first was with a guy who writes educational gaming software for children.  He was smart, but deeply cautious.  He would answer every question very carefully and then bring the interview to a dead stop.   With every question, I would have to get out the paddles and see if I could restart the interview. 

The second interview was much easier.  A woman from the arts who spoke with great ease and wonderful figures of speech.  I could see into her easily.  She lived in a glass house and never closed the drapes.  Lots of momentum here.  She saw where I was going, she saw where she was going, she saw where we might both go.  In this case, the task is to offer direction that was small, precise, and, I hoped, on target, and then write like hell to capture the profusion of data that resulted. 

A couple of days I did an interview with a guy who looked a little Dennis Hopper and talked like him too.  Smart but circuitous.  Just when you would think, "damn, this is going nowhere," he would say something that was remarkably interesting.  My job: to ask a question that Dennis would ignore and then wait patiently for him to wander into  illumination. 

My point, and I do have one, is that I think this interview process has something in common with contemporary culture to the extent that both of them demand that we "shift frame" with greater constancy and skill.  By "shifting frame" I mean that we find ourselves in situation where our favorite and customary assumptions do not apply.  Nor can we see what assumptions do apply.  We are obliged to nose into this world and respond nimbly in real time, and work out what to think and how to act as the data is forthcoming. 

The anthropological conclusion?  This is hard.  It demands a special elasticity.  And too much of it induces a particular inelasticity.  The cosmopolitan becomes a zombie.  Anyhow, think of this post as a "note from my doctor" or at least an excuse why I have been blogging infrequently.  Thanks for your patience.

I live in Montreal, in a neighborhood where everyone is noisy all the time: soccer fans, college kids, street people, muscle cars, good drivers honking at bad drivers, bad drivers sobbing uncontrollably, kids playing the street. Just about everyone makes a joyful sound. Only junkies on the nod in the park withhold their contribution from the city’s din. I live in Bedlam where the moon is always full.

Take a plane and a train and I am in a suburban Connecticut. This world has free standing homes with commanding entrances, color coordinated gardens, trees that reach for the sky, and lawns that roll on and on. There is some noise: birds, lawn movers, houses ceaselessly renovating themselves. But all this happens so far away, it might as well be happening in another county. The only blight on this landscape is the Cris Craft someone has left at the far end of their property. This is Connecticut’s idea of an eyesore.

Even on the weekend, people are well appointed, beautiful, rested. They are genial and say hello to strangers. But then everyone here does have something in common: they have won one of life’s lotteries. Actually, you can’t live here unless you have won most of life’s lotteries: intelligence, beauty, ambition, determination. The little local store looks like a film shoot, with everyone from central casting. The women are more interesting than Stepford wives but not less beautiful.

Montreal in the post war period was a little like Cape Canaveral. My neighborhood was all Jewish families preparing kids for lift off. Fifty years later, these kids now help run Canada, serving as distinguished jurists, university presidents, top surgeons, politicians, lords of capital, architects and writers, Mordicai Richler among them. This is that urban neighborhoods are good at, mixing raw talent with urban opportunity. Houston, we have ignition.

By contrast, the suburb is the place that ideas and ideators are supposed to come to die. Softened by self indulgence, lulled into a sense of complacency, stupefied by good fortune, things coast to a stop. Before you know it, your career is a Cris Craft sitting at the end of the garden. Every so often you think, “we really should take that out for a spin.” And then you don’t, again today.

This is in any case what the intellectuals tell us. The suburban paradise is a trap. It is the worst place for something who has taken orders in the University of Chicago priest hood. The instructions are clear: renounce the world, refuse distraction and blandishment, indulge the idea, not the ideator. And particularly: do not live in a leafy suburb!

Hmmm. But has anyone actually done an empirical test of the proposition that suburbs are bad for the life of the mind. Shouldn’t someone actually do a participant observation?

My pal Jim has a complete set of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was de-accessioned by a library in Quebec and he got it for nothing. It is now worth $8,500.

You can get the OED on line. The Oxford University Press will sell you access for $295.00 a year. If you belong to a University library, access is free.

But this is not the way to read the OED. Here’s what you want to do: get the hard copy, take a volume, any volume, find a big, comfy chair, and start pouring over the text. Warn the kids, unplug the phone, make yourself comfortable. You won’t be back for hours.

You have found a secret way in to a workshop of Western thought and culture.

Here’s the definition of Bohemian:

Taken from French, in which boheme, bohemien have been applied to the gypsies, since their first appearance in the 15th century because they were thought to come from Bohemia or perhaps actually entered the West through that country. Thence, in modern French, the word has been transferred to ‘vagabond, adventurer, person of irregular life or habits’, a sense introduced into English by Thackeray.

How wonderful. There’s more.

[A bohemian is] a gypsy of society: one who either cuts himself off, or by his habits is cut off from society for which he is otherwise fitted.

We know that the notion of the bohemian was embraced by the French avant-garde of the 19th century. They liked the idea of cutting themselves off from society. It become, ironically, a social type.

Indeed, bohemian impulse became ever more mainstream. In the American case, it was the beat poets who served as the agent of diffusion. They made the “person of irregular life or habits” a cultural hero. Youth culture was listening and the 60s saw the idea go wide.

And not just youth. As David Brooks tells us in his useful book, Bobos in paradise, the bourgeois bohemian became a pose for boomers as they traded away the suburbs for lofts in the city and coffee houses downtown. (Printer’s Row in Chicago is one of these. Soho in New York City, another.) Now, the person who “cuts himself off” was actually “cutting himself in” on one of the more interesting experiments in contemporary culture.

Your’re back! Plug the phone in. Give the kids the all-clear sign. Rub your eyes. The OED has just taken us from 15th century gypsies to the French 19th century to the American 20th century to the present day. Sure, $8,500 is a lot of money. But what did you expect to pay for a time machine?

References:

Brooks, David. 2000. Bobos in Paradise: The new upper class and how they got there. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Israel, Kali A. K. 1992. Style, Strategy, and Self-Creation in the Life of Emilia Dilke. in Constructions of the Self. editor George Levine, 191-212. Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

For more on the OED:
Murray, K. M. Elisabeth. 1977. Caught in the web of words: James A.H. Murray and the Oxford English dictionary. New Haven: Yale University Press.

For more on the French bohemians:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255/bohem/tdefine.html

Your link to Abebooks:
http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=256379250