Enactments of Expertise Carr, E. Summerson
Annual review of anthropology,
10/2010, Letnik:
39, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Every society recognizes expertise, and anthropologists have long documented the culturally and historically specific practices that constitute it. The anthropology of expertise focuses on what ...people do rather than what people posses, even in the many circumstances where the former is naturalized as the latter. Across its many domains, expertise is both inherently interactional, involving the participation of objects, producers, and consumers of knowledge, and inescapably ideological, implicated in the evolving hierarchies of value that legitimate particular ways of knowing as "expert." This review focuses on the semiotics of expertise, highlighting four constitutive processes: socialization practices through which people establish intimacy with classes of cultural objects and learn to communicate that familiarity; evaluation, or the establishment of asymmetries among people and between people and objects; institutionalization, wherein ways of knowing are organized and authorized; and naturalization, or the essentialization of expert enactments as bodies of knowledge.
"Wherever we turn, we see diverse things scaled for us, from cities to economies, from history to love. We know scale by many names and through many familiar antinomies: local and global, micro and ...macro events. Even the most critical among us often proceed with our analysis as if such scales were the ready-made platforms of social life, rather than asking how, why, and to what effect are scalar distinctions forged in the first place. How do scalar distinctions help actors and analysts alike make sense of and navigate their social worlds? What do these distinctions reveal and what do they conceal? How are scales construed and what effects do they have on the way those who abide by them think and act? This pathbreaking volume attends to the practical labor of scale-making and the communicative practices this labor requires. From an ethnographic perspective, the authors demonstrate that scale is practice and process before it becomes product, whether in the work of projecting the commons, claiming access to the big picture, or scaling the seriousness of a crime."
Scripting Addictiontakes readers into the highly ritualized world of mainstream American addiction treatment. It is a world where clinical practitioners evaluate how drug users speak about themselves ...and their problems, and where the ideal of "healthy" talk is explicitly promoted, carefully monitored, and identified as the primary sign of therapeutic progress. The book explores the puzzling question: why do addiction counselors dedicate themselves to reconciling drug users' relationship to language in order to reconfigure their relationship to drugs?
To answer this question, anthropologist Summerson Carr traces the charged interactions between counselors, clients, and case managers at "Fresh Beginnings," an addiction treatment program for homeless women in the midwestern United States. She shows that shelter, food, and even the custody of children hang in the balance of everyday therapeutic exchanges, such as clinical assessments, individual therapy sessions, and self-help meetings. Acutely aware of the high stakes of self-representation, experienced clients analyze and learn to effectively perform prescribed ways of speaking, a mimetic practice they call "flipping the script."
As a clinical ethnography,Scripting Addictionexamines how decades of clinical theorizing about addiction, language, self-knowledge, and sobriety is manifested in interactions between counselors and clients. As an ethnography of the contemporary United States, the book demonstrates the complex cultural roots of the powerful clinical ideas that shape therapeutic transactions--and by extension administrative routines and institutional dynamics--at sites such as "Fresh Beginnings."
ABSTRACT
Motivational interviewing (MI) is an American behavioral health intervention that has spread dramatically across professional fields, including counseling psychology, corrections, dentistry, ...nursing, nutrition, primary‐care medicine, safe‐water interventions, and social work. This article explores how the central methodological principles of American pragmatism—if understood and learned as MI—take root among a group of contemporary American helping professionals. More specifically, the article shows how professional training in MI inculcates: (1) a steadfast focus on the immediate consequences of one's acts rather than floating or conceptions of the true, the good, or the right; and (2) an investment in a highly reflexive mode of knowledge acquisition, which relinquishes the certainty of positivist explanations and embraces doubt. Indeed, learning how not to know is part and parcel of becoming an American pragmatist, and this article details the labor, costs, and rewards of adopting a pragmatic, or (in)expert, sensibility. expertise, pragmatism, professionals, knowledge, United States
RESUMEN
Realizar una entrevista motivacional (MI) es una intervención de salud conductual estadounidense que se ha extendido dramáticamente a través de los campos profesionales, incluyendo psicología de consejería, servicios correccionales, odontología, enfermería, nutrición, medicina de atención primaria, intervenciones para agua segura y trabajo social. Este artículo explora cómo los principios metodológicos centrales del pragmatismo estadounidense –si entendidos y aprendidos como MI– se arraigan entre un grupo de profesionales estadounidenses contemporáneos que proveen ayuda. Más específicamente, el artículo muestra cómo el entrenamiento profesional en MI inculca: (1) un enfoque continuo en las consecuencias inmediatas de los actos de uno en lugar de concepciones flotantes o as de lo verdadero, lo bueno o lo correcto; y 2) una inversión en un modo altamente reflexivo de adquisición de conocimiento, el cual renuncia a la certidumbre de las explicaciones positivistas y acoge la duda. En realidad, aprender cómo no saber es parte integral de llegar a ser un pragmatista estadounidense, y este artículo detalla la labor, los costos y las recompensas de adoptar una sensibilidad pragmática o (in)experta. experticia, pragmatismo, profesionales, conocimiento, Estados Unidos
OCCUPATION BEDBUGS CARR, E. SUMMERSON
Cultural anthropology,
20/May , Letnik:
30, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This essay draws on fieldwork with American social workers, whose primary charge is to engage what they view as particularly recalcitrant human problems and populations. All the while, these workers ...find themselves in intensive engagements with bedbugs, which have recently infested the American imaginary, as well as the destitute sites of American social work. As every professional effort at elimination is met with bedbugs’seeming multiplication, eradicating bedbugs comes to be understood as both professional responsibility and practical impossibility—yet another example that the magnitude of the problems with which social workers are charged exceeds their abilities to resolve them. And yet these professionals neither succumb to burnout nor suffer a sustained sense of futility. Rather, bedbugs help them cultivate a sustaining occupational ethic, one that resonates with American systems theories and American Pragmatism. More specifically, human-bedbug engagements inspire a working formulation of agency that acknowledges the efficacies of non-human actors, understands human intention as the framing of, rather than fuel for what actually happens, and privileges the means over the ends of (professional) labor. With a focus on how human-bedbug engagements contribute to the development of folk theories of agency, this article demonstrates the fluidity with which social actors think about the possibilities for effective, meaningful (re) action and thereby contributes to the anthropology of agency.
How is it that confession - a highly ritualized, dialogically structured speech act - appears to transparently reflect and reveal the inner states of confessants? This article explores this question ...by closely engaging select post-Vatican II defences of the Sacrament of Penance, which lay out the requirements of 'modern' confession in striking detail. A close reading of these theological texts demonstrates that felicitous confession is the product of three correlated (meta-) semiotic processes: (1) the figuration of the pentinent memory as a storehouse for sin; (2) the management of ritual time into discrete stages of 'private' meaning-making and 'public' pronouncement; and (3) the erasure of the social scenery of the confessional utterance. In concert, these processes render indexical signs as iconic ones and, in so doing, naturalize confession as the cathartic revelation of inner truths, already constituted as such. Comment se fait-il que la confession, acte de parole dialogique très ritualisé, semble refléter et révéler en toute transparence l'état intérieur de ceux qui s'y livrent ? L'auteure explore cette question en examinant de près certaines défenses post-Vatican II du sacrement de pénitence, qui exposent avec un souci de détail frappant les nécessités d'une confession « moderne ». La lecture attentive de ces textes théologiques montre que les conditions de félicité de la confession sont formées de trois processus (méta) sémiotiques córreles : (1) la figuration de la mémoire pénitente comme un réservoir de péchés ; (2) l'organisation du temps rituel en étapes distinctes d'élaboration de sens « privée » et d'énonciation « publique »; et (3) l'effacement du contexte scénique et social de renonciation confessionnelle. Ces trois processus réunis restituent les signes indexicaux sous la forme de signes iconiques et naturalisent ainsi la confession comme la révélation cathartique de vérités intérieures déjà constituées en tant que telles.
This commentary is an edited version of discussant comments to the Executive Session panel ‘Anthropological Interventions in the US Opioid Crisis’ organized by Jennifer Carroll at the 117th Annual ...Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Diego, CA, November 14-18, 2018.
This essay draws on fieldwork with American social workers, whose primary charge is to engage what they view as particularly recalcitrant human problems and populations. All the while, these workers ...find themselves in intensive engagements with bedbugs, which have recently infested the American imaginary, as well as the destitute sites of American social work. As every professional effort at elimination is met with bedbugs’ seeming multiplication, eradicating bedbugs comes to be understood as both professional responsibility and practical impossibility—yet another example that themagnitude of the problems with which social workers are charged exceeds their abilities to resolve them. And yet these professionals neither succumb to burnout nor suffer a sustained sense of futility. Rather, bedbugs help them cultivate a sustaining occupational ethic, one that resonates with American systems theories and American Pragmatism. More specifically, human-bedbug engagements inspire a working formulation of agency that acknowledges the efficacies of non-human actors, understands human intention as the framing of, rather than fuel for what actually happens, and privileges the means over the ends of (professional) labor. With a focus on how human-bedbug engagements contribute to the development of folk theories of agency, this article demonstrates the fluidity with which social actors think about the possibilities for effective, meaningful (re)action and thereby contributes to the anthropology of agency.
Motivational interviewing (MI) is an increasingly prominent behavioral therapy that draws from and claims to synthesize two American therapeutic traditions long thought to be ...antithetical—“client-centered” and “directive” approaches. This paper proposes that MI achieves its hallmark “client-centered directiveness” through the aesthetic management of the therapeutic encounter, and more particularly, through MI practitioners’ marked use of silence. Drawing on data collected during the ethnographic study of MI trainings and the formal analysis of video-recorded MI sessions that are commonly used as models in such trainings, we identify three patterns of pause that regularly fall at specific grammatical junctures within seasoned MI practitioners’ turns-at-talk. We demonstrate how these pauses allow MI practitioners to subtly direct the conversation while simultaneously displaying unequivocal signs of client-centeredness. In other words, we show how and explain why the poetics of pause matter to MI. In presenting this case, we more generally highlight
practice poetics
—that is, the aesthetic management of the style and delivery of a professional message with a particular practical aim in mind—suggesting that this is a central if under-appreciated aspect of therapeutic practices.
PDF
