Michael H. Agar (1945–2017)

At a time when numerous disciplines, organizations, and communities are discovering ethnography, Agar shows how the fundamentals endure even as they adapt to a world unimagined when the research perspective developed more than 100 years ago. Contemporary discussions of ethnography are loaded with choices, primarily "either-or" options. Just as the first edition crossed the qualitative-quantitative divide, the new edition integrates classical scientific notions with new concepts such as narrative and interpretation. Agar updates the contrast between the researcher's apprenticeship to knowledgeable informants and the hypothesis-testing mode that still dominates social science, while demonstrating the complementarity of the two. Drawing extensively from his own research experience, he illustrates the stages of the ethnographic process from inception through the emergence of a focus, and toward a subsequent formalization of methods and analysis. In the process, he illustrates several approaches designed to reconcile the contradictory demands of the scientific process and human behavior. It analyses the changes in ethnographic studies during the last fifteen years. It outlines the conflict between science and interpretation. It presents the politics of ethnography, both personal and global. It describes the 'new' participant observation. It sheds light on ethno-logic. It includes methods for the non-positive.… (lisätietoja)

This final book from Michael Agar, who died in 2017, is fine example of his humanity. With his usual abundance of humor, he reconstructs the concept of culture, from the bottom up. I had no idea it needed doing, but he shows that it does, in no uncertain terms. Or rather, in unfortunately uncertain terms.

He begins with the differences between lower case c culture and upper case Culture, mixes in lower case language and upper case Language, and the gaps in our understanding become canyons.

Going back to the dawn of Homo sapiens, Agar says “The new human ability to tinker, to innovate, to generate is called culture.” When this results in useful innovation, passed laterally to other tribes and through time as tradition, it can be called Culture. All you need for culture is two people working on the same thing. For Culture, they need to pass it on.

Two other things shape it. One is generativity, the creation of new tropes. The other is constraints, that allow everyone to understand them the same way and keep the generative to a level everyone can internalize. This is not the everyday concept of culture.

He demonstrates the parallels to language, which began at about the same time, eventually combining the two rather than having to explain the same things twice all the time. Languaculture is the result.

Those are the basic components of Culture, but… Just when it seems there is this elegant solution, Agar tosses a wrench in. In our internetworked society, Cultures are compromised, expanded and cross fertilized, if not corrupted. We have therefore, a rising star called the hybrid. Hybrids know more than one culture, can live comfortably in them all, and can translate for others. Hybrids are bridges. Does that mean we’re evolving into one worldwide Culture? Out of scope, I’m afraid.

Another solution to the complication of Culture is Social Perspective Taking (SPT). In non-jargon terms it is empathy, putting oneself in someone else’s position, seeing the world as they do. Agar has unlimited examples of the benefits of SPT from studies as well as his own varied life all over the world, studying different peoples as an ethnographer.

This is one of the joys of a Michael Agar book. He is compulsively observant. Ethnographers don’t shut down at 5pm. It is made so much worse by his choice of field, anthropological linguistics. That necessarily spills over into things like cognitive psychology and a long list of other social sciences, humanities and ologies, which kept him busy –and learning– for a lifetime.

It’s very odd, at least to me, that someone can spend a lifetime in a scientific field, only to produce a last book that must try to define what underlies the entire discipline. This cultural anthropologist came to the point where he felt he had to define culture, because it was not clear, self-evident or settled.

You might think that is stunning, but just a couple of months ago I reviewed a physics book which showed that here in 2019, we still don’t know what gravity is. Maybe it’s a new genre.

As usual, Agar shows himself totally at home in his discipline(s), completely in command, with full understanding and the ability to swing concepts around and make them useful. His confidence and comfort, combined with his humor (both sarcastic and self-deprecating), keeps the dry science moving briskly. Always a pleasure. Sorry it’s the last one.

David Wineberg… (lisätietoja)

As opposed to dismal

I have nothing but praise for Michael Agar’s style. He is at ease in this medium. He can joke, be self deprecating, and yet deliver again and again. He writes with the confidence of experience and the comfort of not actually needing to do this. He interjects himself, and breaks up the potential monotony with color. He is engaging. I gave up counting how many times he dragged his love/hate relationship with his Subaru Forester stationwagon into the narrative, but it works. Both the car and the book.

Agar is having an identity crisis with his field, human social research (HSR). He says it took the wrong fork in the road 150 years ago, and has been twisted and tormented by “pure” science ever since. In sciences like maths or physics, chemistry or biology, it’s all about hypotheses, numbers and replication. But when dealing with human activity, you need to take the subjects into consideration. Specifically, humans’ intentionality and lived experience make HSR a different beast, with different approaches needed, and different expectations for outcomes. So while a subject might answer a structured question one way, his lived experience might provide different data, and an unexpected outcome. Agar says, “The lived experience, researcher and subject intentionality are as important to HSR as mass and motion are to physics.” But the purists will have none of it.

Worse, pure science’s approach is naive; its claim to be unbiased is not so much laughable as impossible, Agar says. HSR is about how you acquire the measure of the study, not about putting a rigid hypothesis to the test. He says the study itself will point to new directions and conclusions. HSR is the jazz improv of science.

Agar describes the book as a newcomer’s first look at HSR. But that’s not what comes across. Obviously, it contains a detailed description of the field and its history. But it is also a plea for openmindedness and flexibility, sorely lacking in science, as it takes on the mantle of religion in its structured regimentation and intolerance of outliers with nonsense talk of the earth rotating around the sun.

Where the book disappoints is that Agar has not broken out of the pack himself. Even as he approaches retirement, even though he does not fear criticism, and even though he clearly sees lost potential, he too seems held back by tradition. He is all over references to 19th century thinkers. They validate his desire to reach out and beyond. But I expected a breakout revelation of a whole new approach for this lively science. Instead, Agar is happy to have got the complaint down on paper, and leaves it to future volumes or other researchers to break away from the structures and strictures of the past.

He does have solid, recognized ideas of his own, including rich points – discoveries made in the course of a study that can change the researcher’s approach, and languaculture, the acknowledgment that 1) language shapes our understanding and 2) translation is never totally accurate, which combined lead to false conclusions. But there is no radical new approach, no startling results from a dramatic new method, and no call to arms to define one.

And no word on the fate of the Subaru.

David Wineberg… (lisätietoja)