Quest for Small
As an anthropologist, I am often appalled at the way other perceptions of our craft are misinterpreted. I suppose it's similar to how Hollywood slices and dices the psychiatric profession - we laugh at the Freudian image that is overused of stolid and Victorian-era dressed misanthrope sits and listens without producing meaningful results. In truth, today's psychiatrist or psychologist (the two genres are confused so often, but they are unique and independent approaches to analysis) are nowhere near that viewpoint...but that is the image that worked its way into the Western cultural matrix and so is used to convey the role without going into hideous amounts of backstory.
With respect to anthropology, we are seen as Indiana Jones...the adventurous individual that fights snakes, evil doers, etc. to find the Holy Grail. The image also associated with us, once we find the results, is of selling them to the highest bidder. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. The modern anthropologist (and the mythos-associated paleo- or archaeologist...clad together in folks' minds like the Freudian Siamese twin) is more like the lab technician on the CSI shows. We search for the smallest of findings and extrapolate backwards from the trivia to its place in the whole of the culture we seek to model. And a model it is, as most ancient cultures did not have a fully digital matrix of cultural symbology as Western civilization does today for future of my kind to not have to guess at.
Mark and I were haggling at this idea the other day, and it was amazingly similar to his client's perception of what the concept of an IT "geek" is today...and I told him so. My perception of our culture's defined model of an IT geek is a pale-skinned, bespectacled youthful male with geek-speak t-shirt, dirty and unwashed hair and pants, eyes glued to the raw glow of the tube placed mentally in front of him. Again, the reality of this is far from the truth.
Now, I don't work for these folks...but I study them absent-mindedly as it is my chosen profession. I am not a sociologist, per se, but as a whole, an anthropologist frames the Way of Man as an artwork of evolution, and in this timeslice, the IT geek typifies the same role as the peak technologist of this era. In previous eras, we have shipbuilders, artisans, and hunters take that title.
As with most of my prodigious mental hypertexts, this rationale led me to flash upon what is perhaps the best cultural exposition of Man's early years at the dawn of true culture, brought to film, which is the last century's cultural recording media - a small and under-rated movie called "Quest for Fire". Hideously panned by the normal reviewers, thought of as "too aesthetic" by most, it paints a decided realistic timeslice of the timeframe at which humans began to work with altering its environment. The main character in fact learns how to use a small technological tool from a culture that has already mastered it, and in doing so, changes his tribe's way forever. While not histrionically or anthropologically 100% correct, it comes much closer than anything else about another mythologically-cast socio-image...the cave man. Hence the link.
All of these "typecast" roles in history...the psychologist, the anthropologist, the geek, and the cave man...can all be symbolized by the concept of an individual searching for the small. Not, as they are often plastered into imagery, the large. By looking at the small, we examine everything it is built upon, like looking at a single Lego brick and inferring the complete build. Unless you get it right, the whole concept goes wrong...and such is the danger of the observer changing the observed through just the simple process of observing.
So when you next look at the geek or the trench-digger or the shrink, stop and ask yourself why these non-appealing and deprecatory terms came to be, instead of honorable ones like "consultant", "technician", or "healer". Why force yourself into accepting the media-framed images of our kind, when you can simply look again and understand these folks' role in changing our culture by studying and working with the minutiae?
With respect to anthropology, we are seen as Indiana Jones...the adventurous individual that fights snakes, evil doers, etc. to find the Holy Grail. The image also associated with us, once we find the results, is of selling them to the highest bidder. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. The modern anthropologist (and the mythos-associated paleo- or archaeologist...clad together in folks' minds like the Freudian Siamese twin) is more like the lab technician on the CSI shows. We search for the smallest of findings and extrapolate backwards from the trivia to its place in the whole of the culture we seek to model. And a model it is, as most ancient cultures did not have a fully digital matrix of cultural symbology as Western civilization does today for future of my kind to not have to guess at.
Mark and I were haggling at this idea the other day, and it was amazingly similar to his client's perception of what the concept of an IT "geek" is today...and I told him so. My perception of our culture's defined model of an IT geek is a pale-skinned, bespectacled youthful male with geek-speak t-shirt, dirty and unwashed hair and pants, eyes glued to the raw glow of the tube placed mentally in front of him. Again, the reality of this is far from the truth.
Now, I don't work for these folks...but I study them absent-mindedly as it is my chosen profession. I am not a sociologist, per se, but as a whole, an anthropologist frames the Way of Man as an artwork of evolution, and in this timeslice, the IT geek typifies the same role as the peak technologist of this era. In previous eras, we have shipbuilders, artisans, and hunters take that title.
As with most of my prodigious mental hypertexts, this rationale led me to flash upon what is perhaps the best cultural exposition of Man's early years at the dawn of true culture, brought to film, which is the last century's cultural recording media - a small and under-rated movie called "Quest for Fire". Hideously panned by the normal reviewers, thought of as "too aesthetic" by most, it paints a decided realistic timeslice of the timeframe at which humans began to work with altering its environment. The main character in fact learns how to use a small technological tool from a culture that has already mastered it, and in doing so, changes his tribe's way forever. While not histrionically or anthropologically 100% correct, it comes much closer than anything else about another mythologically-cast socio-image...the cave man. Hence the link.
All of these "typecast" roles in history...the psychologist, the anthropologist, the geek, and the cave man...can all be symbolized by the concept of an individual searching for the small. Not, as they are often plastered into imagery, the large. By looking at the small, we examine everything it is built upon, like looking at a single Lego brick and inferring the complete build. Unless you get it right, the whole concept goes wrong...and such is the danger of the observer changing the observed through just the simple process of observing.
So when you next look at the geek or the trench-digger or the shrink, stop and ask yourself why these non-appealing and deprecatory terms came to be, instead of honorable ones like "consultant", "technician", or "healer". Why force yourself into accepting the media-framed images of our kind, when you can simply look again and understand these folks' role in changing our culture by studying and working with the minutiae?
posted by Drusilla Joplin at
11:20 AM
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