Jakob Meloe and why it takes one (skilled person) to know one (other skilled person).

[Huon Wardle]

I am not a huge fan of the recent crop of phenomenological theories as they impinge on anthropology, but this elegantly written essay by Jakob Meloe's from the 1980s does seem worth thinking more about.

 

Meloe begins with the proposition that 'we are poor observers of whatever activities we are not familiar with as agents'. When we observe someone else doing something it makes a very big difference, in terms of the inferences we draw, whether we have skilled ourselves in doing that thing or not. A person with no mathematical knowledge who stares at a mathematician writing on a board is, so to speak, staring into a vacuum. In contrast, 'the skilled observer of a fisherman at work is another fisherman. The skilled observer of a surgeon at work is another surgeon'. The person with relevant skills has a full sense of - here Meloe introduces one of very few technical phrases - 'the activity space' of the skill in question. A fisherman who watching a game of chess sees a bishop 'moving in a North-Easterly direction' has not understood the activity space of chess or the potential of the bishop as an agent in the game - they do not understand, for example, that bishop can 'threaten' queen and what that means. Likewise the person who never cooks who cannot 'see' what is being done in the kitchen.

 

If skills, observation and the imaginative 'activity space' go together then this means that observing someone else doing something entails an increasing enskilling in the possibilities of the activity space that person works in and occupies.

 

The full text is attached as a pdf

[Stacy A A Hope]

Huon,

I was just writing a blog on transitioning from one area of focus to the next, and deduced that one attribute to the success of transition is through the "monkey-see-monkey-do" method. However, as pointed out observing a mathematician (pure) who works in abstract, as opposed to a fisherman who works through application give birth to two separate results. Let's just say that I will be reading this article with hungry eyes. 

[Philip Swift]

Thanks Huon,

Meloe's essay is a real treat. He writes of complicated relations (between 'seeing' and 'doing' - the sorts of doing that seeing does; the sorts of seeing that doing opens up) in a delightful, uncomplicated style.

Parts of it reminded me of William James' piece, 'On a certain blindness in human beings': 'The spectator's judgement is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less...'

I'm interested to know what your misgivings about phenomenology are - but perhaps this isn't the place.

So, sticking to Meloe - in particular, his point about the possibilities of action that terrain might provide, so long as you can see it - there's a nice take on this in Iain Borden's book on skateboarding. For the skateboarder, the urban terrain can show up very differently as a space for action, so that a handrail on a stairway - a design feature we might - if we notice it at all - associate with the grip of stability, with safety, becomes, for the skater, a risky surface to ride on. Borden quotes Thrasher magazine:

'Most people think handrails are for those with mobility problems. Christian Hosoi says they are for ollie nose grinds'.

[John McCreery]

Thanks, Huon. A real treat, indeed.

Probably a bit boring now, but allow me to make my usual anti-categorical judgment move, noting that skill sets may overlap in interesting ways that give the observer a way into what is going on. From my fieldwork in Taiwan and subsequent efforts to write it up, I offer two examples.

First, I have been working for several months with the Daoist healer whose rituals become the topic of my thesis. I take a friend to visit the healer's storefront temple and observe how he interacts with the people who seek his aid. My friend speaks Mandarin Chinese but not Taiwanese, the language in which the healer works. He is, however, a trained psychiatric social worker and a student of psychohistorian Robert Lifton (best known, perhaps, for his work on survivor guilt in survivors of Hiroshima). A we leave the temple and start walking home, my friend spontaneously says, "That guy is good. He could be making $75 an hour on Park Avenue." This was, mind you, in 1970, when $75 was a lot of money. It was already a common trope in anthropology to suggest that traditional healers and modern therapists have a lot in common, but this was, at that moment, a striking confirmation—which, I now reflect, had a lot to do with the overlap in the skill sets of at least this particular Daoist healer and those of the psychotherapist, who also sits quietly, murmuring encouraging words as the client tells her story and, after listening for while, may tactfully pose a question, "Could it be...."

Much later, in 1994, when I was writing the piece that became the chapter "Malinowski, Magic and Advertising" in John Sherry's Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior , I found myself considering another overlap, between Daoist healers and the advertising creatives with whom I was then working. I observed that the same Daoist healer mentioned above was, like the people I was working with, meticulous in the staging of his rituals in a way similar that of those who produce TV commercials.

I find myself thinking of Meloe's example of the fisherman who learns to play chess. It occurs to me that when the first time he saw chess played, he might not have understood the game. It is, however, likely that when told that chess is a game, he had a fair lot of experience with other games, softball, say, or tic-tac-toe. A bounded space? Check. Two sides? Check. A winner and a loser? Check. Rules that must be obeyed? Check. This generic notion of "game" became, in effect, a template in which he could fill in the details. Then he could start playing as a duffer and, if he played and studied the game enough, become an expert.

Doesn't this seem to you a lot like what we do in fieldwork and writing up?

[Keith Hart]

It is hard for me to express how much I dislike this piece. It may be because of his reliance on seeing (I have only one eye which makes how I see different from most people). It may be because I think Norwegians are crazy in ways that he exemplifies. It may be because of his reliance on a Fordist vision of work. It may be because he believes universities are separate from society (when most of the many things we do are done by others elsewhere). It may be because of his emphasis on space (god save me from geographers) or his Saussurian reliance on chess (with all its structuralist implications). So that by the time he gets to his only point with which I have some sympathy (possibilities of movement), it is too late (for me).

I could go on at length about why I would understand his examples differently. We all learn how to wash dishes and to put them away or to set the table, but when guests offer to help with a meal, I send them packing, because they don't know the order of my kitchen or table. People vary in how much attention they pay to change, indeed in their ability to calculate mentally. While our Norwegian philosopher is obsessively concentrating on whether the guy in front gets the right change, the latter may be thinking about the steak he is going to cook and trusts the butcher or relies on him to correct an error or can't be bothered counting.

Ethnographers usually have to reconstruct events that were unexpected, which they partially understand if at all, which involve participants who weren't physically there. We rely on human judgment and social interaction. The critique of seeing or observation as a metaphor for what we do in the field has been long-standing (Fabian). Chess or rock-climbing it ain't. Human connection allows us to discover skills held partially in common or complementarily. But I would never imagine that I know what is going on between someone else's ears because I am an expert in the same thing.

The most valuable skills are general ones that have many ways of being adapted to specific situations. But there must always be some approximation to local conditions and especially social interaction. Max Weber used to say that we study what we are or what we are not. Anthropologists study human beings. Go figure. If we would aspire to be a human being in order to study them, this is the last manual I would give to an apprentice.

[Huon Wardle]

Ethnographers usually have to reconstruct events that were unexpected, which they partially understand if at all, which involve participants who weren't physically there. We rely on human judgment and social interaction. The critique of seeing or observation as a metaphor for what we do in the field has been long-standing (Fabian). Chess or rock-climbing it ain't. Human connection allows us to discover skills held partially in common or complementarily. But I would never imagine that I know what is going on between someone else's ears because I am an expert in the same thing.

 

I share some of those misgivings, but I don't think they necessarily knock this discussion out of the water. As a general critique I agree this is part of why I don't like phenomenological analyses precisely because they are 'self-absorbed' in an almost literal sense and they don't give enough room for disagreement, hunch or guesswork, rule of thumb, models that can be switched between situations; and there also tends to be a kind of back to nature anti-technologism. I also agree you could present the examples quite differently, introducing disagreement and trust, how people overlook other people's foibles, how foibles get presented as necessary 'skills' when they are just quirks and so on.

 

Having said that, Meloe strikes me as saying almost the opposite of what you are presenting him as saying, Keith. His point is that observation plain and simple tends to be illusory; knowing what is going on means something approximate to occupying of the skill involved - you cannot depend on seeing or observation to know all there is to be known. I don't think the fact that there are carefully developed skills that are not susceptible to the 'one model fits all' type thinking can be gainsaid so easily - for instance every child knows that they know things their parents don't, teachers have tricks and skills built up over a long time; not to mention that most people would rather put their lives in the hands of a skillful surgeon than a lecturer in geography. Of course it is also true that if there were no 'one rule fits most' models it would be almost impossible to communicate. Which is what I take John to be referring to:

 

It occurs to me that when the first time [the fisherman] saw chess played, he might not have understood the game. It is, however, likely that when told that chess is a game, he had a fair lot of experience with other games, softball, say, or tic-tac-toe.

 

There is definitely something in the 'Fordist' argument, though - each person has their set skill. It reminds me that Veblen said that the most empirical thinkers were factory workers who were trained to assign objects their correct properties.

 

Philip, thanks for the references and for introducing ollie nose grinds to this discussion. Next stop William James. Good luck with yours Stacy.

[Huon Wardle]

The lecture by William James that Philip pointed to provides a striking contrast in as much as it also focuses on the inaccessibility of other individual lives by way of just looking at them, but it emphasises the need to appreciate the volume of human 'feelings' which drive others lives which we cannot appreciate without some poetic or philosophical leap. So, James quotes Robert L Stevenson describing the excitement and joy when many people meet at night carrying lanterns:

 

"For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology. . . . It has so little bond with externals . . . that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy. . . . In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.

"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books. . . . In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall." (1)

These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. Our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.

 

You might say James takes the opposite route to Meloe in as much as he indicates that appreciating the interior life requires a kind of expansive deskilling and loss of practical focus.

[Keith Hart]

Thanks Huon for providing the opportunity for a rant and for offering a humane corrective to it. Do you think the metaphor of seeing is important in his argument or not? I am quite sure that my interpretation is blind in some respects, but I started out be indicating some of the reasons for not seeing it. As Keynes said, A writer requires a lot of sympathy from his readers. He didn't get mine.

[Huon Wardle]

You are right, because he starts from the expectation that seeing should have some special priority and uses that as his springboard. The William James piece is a corrective, because it shows that even a coolly 'skilled' appreciation of what someone else is doing isn't enough; real judgement may require some kind of further 'ejective' awareness of the sublime in the particular. Aggrandising personal 'skill' might provide a sort of defense mechanism but may also make our imaginative lives more dull and isolated.

 

Skill from this point of view might give a merely rational knowledge. In contrast what is truly going on remains 'hard to hit' as Stevenson puts it. Also, the emphasis on what is immediately present is a real problem too because, as you say, most of our knowledge draws on awareness of other people who aren't present in the scenes we are trying to understand.

[Huon Wardle]

By the way, I think that the very best description I have ever read of what Meloe calls the 'activity space' can be found in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi where he is talking about learning how to navigate the river from Mr Bixby the captain of his steamboat - the phrase 'mark twain' comes from riverboat navigation:

 

Perplexing Lessons

At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my head full of islands, towns, bars, 'points,' and bends; and a curiously inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I could shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I could make her skip those little gaps. But of course my complacency could hardly get start enough to lift my nose a trifle into the air, before Mr. Bixby would think of something to fetch it down again. One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler—

'What is the shape of Walnut Bend?'

He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.

I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds of ammunition, and was sure to subside into a very placable and even remorseful old smooth-bore as soon as they were all gone. That word 'old' is merely affectionate; he was not more than thirty-four. I waited. By and by he said—

'My boy, you've got to know the SHAPE of the river perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the night that it has in the day-time.'…

'You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd RUN them for straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways. You see—'

'Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered.'

'NO! you only learn THE shape of the river, and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR HEAD, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.'

[Philip Swift]

 

The Twain illustration is lovely, though I must say that I enjoyed Keith's glorious attack, which enabled me to see (if you'll forgive the visual metaphor) Meloe's text from a very different angle.

 

All the same - and at risk of stating the obvious - I take Meloe's argument to be affiliated with wider philosophical critiques of the validity of disinterested speculation, which is countered by a turn towards thinking about everyday, practical activities and instances. A similar approach to Meloe's was advanced by Gilbert Ryle ('The thinking of thoughts') whose coinage of the term 'thick description' was, of course, so successfully sold by Geertz.

 

I suppose one could object that the examples presented aren't everyday enough, or, at least, are perhaps too artificial for anthropological tastes. (Where the Norwegian Meloe appeals to fishing and rock-climbing, Ryle's typical Oxford-style illustrations include the famous boys winking at each other, people engaging in rural shopping expeditions, etc, and - yes - chess, which must have transnational philosophical attraction. On the other hand, Heidegger was keen on homely, romanticised appeals to traditional craft activities and the domestic settings of the Black Forest peasantry...)

 

But the problem remains: how do we go about knowing about doing, and what would constitute a good description of it? If I can be forgiven for quoting more William James (this time from Varieties of Religious Experience), here he is on the problem with overly intellectual descriptions:

 

'As in stereoscopic or kinetoscopic pictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension, the movement, the vital element, are not there. We get a beautiful picture of an express train supposed to be moving, but where in the picture, as I have heard a friend say, is the energy or the fifty miles an hour?'

 

[Huon Wardle]

 

I suppose one could object that the examples presented aren't everyday enough, or, at least, are perhaps too artificial for anthropological tastes.... But the problem remains: how do we go about knowing about doing

 

That is very fair - the kind of problem at issue, doing ('knowing how' versus 'knowing that'), may well require particular kinds of description - you can't have all your balls in the air at once, after all. Even so, sometimes those descriptions can seem very closed and re-iterative; unlinked to anything outside themselves and in a way self-fulfilling.

 

Alfred Gell adds another angle to the problem of appreciating skill with his idea of the artist as an 'occult technician' (in his well known 'The Technology of Enchantment' essay). He argues that what enchants us in an art object is the sensed gap between our modest skill and the higher technological skill of the artist in transforming the materials. The argument fits with what Meloe says about our difficulty in recognising what people are doing when we haven't acquired skill in that domain.

 

There is a bluntness about Gell's approach that is attractive, and there is even a mischievous sense of seeing the emperor with no clothes. Gell's argument tells us that we confuse grand feelings with a technical ratio - 'my skill' < 'the artist's skill'. We don't know 'how' the artist achieved what they did so we fill the gap with magic. But, to me this doesn't describe fully how we respond to art objects, or even human-made objects nor yet other people's skills. Some of the alternatives might be found in James' view. In part we end up with a kind of battle of words "I say 'art' you say 'skills gap'" as it were.

[John McCreery]

"I say 'art' you say 'skills gap'" as it were.

 

Hold on a minute. Do you really want to equate art with superior skill?

 

I think about a parallel distinction frequently drawn in the advertising industry between "production values" and "creativity." Production values are the products of skill. They add polish to the commercial and can be achieved by hiring people with the right skill sets: "You want that car to look gorgeous, we know just the photographer...." "We need a nice deep voice...." "To pull off a stunt like that...." Part of becoming a creative director is to build a network of people who can supply the skills you need when an idea has been sold and the process moves to production. "Creativity" is, in contrast, always unexpected. The creator sees the problem that the ad is supposed to address from an angle no one has thought of before. People say, "Wow! Where did that come from?" and, more often than not, the creator says, "It just came to me." Rationalizations are possible, but they are always post-hoc.

It is no accident that since ancient times poets and artists have talked about the muse or that art has been likened to possession, with the rational, technically skilled self thrust out of the way by something that, whether conceived as welling up inside or intruding from the outside always comes from another place that reason and skill fail to comprehend. 

One might argue, of course, that it is anthropology's business to demystify ancient wisdom. But in this case I am not sure that we either should or could.