Author: HHS Contributor

Review: Emily Martin’s Experiments of the Mind

Review of Emily Martin, Experiments of the mind: From the cognitive psychology lab to the world of Facebook and Twitter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021)

Maarten Derksen (Theory & History of Psychology, University of Groningen)

Experiments of the mind is the result of a ten year-long project studying experimental psychology ethnographically, as a participant-observer in four laboratories. Emily Martin sat in on lab meetings, interviewed researchers, participated in experiments, and even tried her hand at running them. It has resulted in a book that contains many insightful observations.

Martin went into this study with an admirably open mind. Whereas her anthropology colleagues’ thought experimental psychology is a boring topic, she realized that the project of experimental psychology — to produce objective knowledge stripped of the subjectivity that both researchers and experimental subjects bring to the process — is fascinating, whether or not you think it is a worthwhile thing to strive for. Her open-mindedness allowed Martin to make the familiar strange: to alert the reader to aspects of experimental psychological practice that seem unremarkable or do not get noted at all.

To her surprise, studying the individual mind is an intensely social activity. The culture of experimental psychology is one of collaboration, mutual support, and frequent informal gatherings (much more so than in anthropology, she notes). In fact, Martin seems to have found especially social and collaborative labs. Not only are the psychologists who she studied without exception presented as very nice people (as becomes clear from the ‘dramatis personae’ that the book opens with), there is also an almost complete absence of conflict and competition. The labs are friendly, wholesome places, and there seems to be no scarcity. The post docs do not worry about finding another position after their current contract ends. There are no complaints about reviewer two, and the researchers do not struggle to get their work published or to get funding for the next project. This remarkable state of affairs would have merited more reflection, because such aspects of academic life are part and parcel of the production of knowledge.

The social nature of experimental psychology, Martin emphasizes, does not only lie in the relations between researchers. The experiments that are conducted are themselves thoroughly social events. Good experimenters care for their subjects’ well-being, if only because a subject who is bored or in pain does not produce good data. Moreover, experimenters socialize their subjects to become part of their world by training and instructing them so that they can play a role as good subjects. Experiments start by giving the subject instructions, usually followed by a brief practice round. Paradoxically, producing objective knowledge requires a carefully prepared subject. Martin also notices the importance of the virtually omnipresent pieces of furniture in psychological laboratories: a table and a chair for physically stabilising the subject. In this respect they serve the same function as the fixation point that controls the gaze of the subject, and which is an equally common device in experimental psychology. Ironically, Martin herself was a terrible subject, plagued by performance anxiety and constantly second-guessing the intentions of the experimenter. Time and again experimenters had to reassure her that her poor performance was not a problem, and if her data were too unusual they would simply be discarded.

Despite the researchers’ best efforts at disciplining their participants, and despite the devices (EEG, fMRI, eye-trackers) they have at their disposal to measure responses, producing data is not a smooth, automatic process. In a wonderful chapter titled ‘Gazing technologically’ Martin describes the human interventions, the judgment, the social relations it requires to keep the machinery running and bridge the gaps that inevitably fall between the experiment as intended and its actual realisation. She closes this chapter by saying that psychologists’ training and methods ignore these gaps between ideal and practice, but that does not do justice to the work she has just described so well: these gaps are a constant concern for researchers. This is one of several places where her analysis seems a bit off the mark to me. Another example concerns the training of participants. This, Martin writes, is an example of ‘problems and methods passing one another by’, as Wittgenstein famously remarked about psychology. The methods, in Martin’s view, circle around the problem, the cognitive experiences of the subjects, picking out statistically significant findings. But it seems more to the point to say that a particular version of the problem is being enacted by the method. Problem and method do not pass each other by as ships in the night. On the contrary, training and stabilising the subjects is part of creating a particular coupling of problem and method. In the process, the conscious experiences of the subjects disappear from view, only becoming visible if they destabilize this particular enactment of the research topic.

As the title of the book indicates, Martin has followed psychological theories and techniques from the lab into the world of social media. In the last two chapters Martin tries to show that companies like Meta/Facebook and Twitter.inc rely on psychological paradigms to attract users and keep them clicking on the links to their advertisers. They have turned us all into psychological subjects, unwittingly being manipulated and experimented on, and filling in the same kind of questionnaires as the participants in the lab. Unfortunately, this is not the best part of the book. Some of the links and resemblances that she tries to show between experimental psychology and the practices of Twitter and Facebook are just not there. As she acknowledges herself, Facebook doesn’t care whether you are standing up, lying down, or sitting down, whereas the subject in psychology experiments must be stabilized, immobilized to produce good data. Neither are the users of social media trained like the participants in experiments. The algorithms that platforms like Facebook employ are trained, as Martin notes, but they are not the users of the technology. Finally, it seems questionable whether participants in psychological laboratories ‘willingly’ provide data, as Martin writes. They are usually paid or compensated with course credit after all, unlike the users of social media. These differences are just as interesting as the commonalities between psychological and social media practices that Martin is intent to point out. Ultimately, however, the impression that this book leaves is shaped not by these two chapters, but by Martin’s many fascinating observations about the social production of psychological findings.

History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize, 2022-23

History of the Human Sciences – the international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides the leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its annual prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognise a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply.

Guidelines for the Award

Scholars who wish to be considered for the award are asked to submit an up-to-date two-page CV (including a statement that confirms eligibility for the award) and an essay that is a maximum of 12,000 words long (including notes and references). The essay should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere, based on original research, written in English, and follow History of the Human Science’s style guide. Scholars are advised to read the journal’s description of its aims and scope, as well as its submission guidelines.

Entries will be judged by a panel drawn from the journal’s editorial team and board. They will identify the essay that best fits the journal’s aims and scope.

Eligibility

Scholars of any nationality who have either not yet been awarded a PhD or are no more than five years from its award are welcome to apply. The judging panel will use the definition of “active years”, with time away from academia for parental leave, health problems, or other relevant reasons being disregarded in the calculation. They will also be sensitive to the disruption that the Covid 19 pandemic has had on career progression and will take such factors into account in their decision making. Candidates are encouraged to include details relating to any of these issues in their supporting documents.

Prize

The winning scholar will be awarded £250 and have their essay published in History of the Human Sciences (subject to the essay passing through the journal’s peer review process). The intention is to award the prize to a single entrant but the judging panel may choose to recognise more than one essay in the event of a particularly strong field.

Deadlines

Entries should be made by Friday 27th January 2022. The panel aims to make a decision by Friday 28th April 2022. The winning entry will be submitted for peer review automatically. The article, clearly identified as the winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize, will then be published in the journal as soon as the production schedule allows. The winning scholar and article will also be promoted by History of the Human Sciences, including on its website, which hosts content separate to the journal.

Previous Winners

2021-22: Harry Parker (Cambridge), “The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain”.

Special commendation: Ohad Reiss Sorokin (Princeton), “”‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)”.

2020-21: Liana Glew (Penn State), “Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history” and Simon Torracinta (Yale), “Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants”

Special commendation: Erik Baker (Harvard), “The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian”

2019-20: Danielle Carr (Columbia), “Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism”

Special commendation: Katie Joice (Birkbeck), “Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67”

You can read more about these essays in interviews with the authors on the website.

To Apply

Entrants should e-mail an anonymised copy of their essay, along with an up-to-date CV, to hhs@histhum.com. 

Further Enquiries

If you have any questions about the prize, or anything relating to the journal, please email hhs@histhum.com. 

Review: Samuël Coghe, Population Politics in the Tropics

Samuël Coghe: Population Politics in the Tropics: Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) 317 pp. ISBN 978 1 10894 3 307

Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger (Giessen)

In Population Politics in the Tropics, Samuël Coghe studies the population politics of the Portuguese government in colonial Angola from 1890 to 1945, instigated due to its fear of depopulation. In view of the abolition of slavery, the indigenato-system was set up in 1870, which implied a system of forced labor leading to a formerly unknown regional mobility of African people (The transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1836 but continued along illegal routes until the end of the century. Slavery was officially abolished in 1875). In times of an increasing influx of Portuguese farmers and traders to “modernize” the colony, especially after the Berlin Conference of 1884/85, smallpox and famines increased because of the breakdown of the ecological control of the lands, based on centuries of long-established modes of agriculture. Now, with the construction of the railway and the introduction of different agrarian cultivations for export, the organization of the land gradually changed and the traditional knowledge of ecological landscapes faded away. Consequently, a “racial disease” (p. 31) spread, known as the sleeping illness, to which native Angolans were especially vulnerable, which made the Portuguese even more convinced of their inferiority. However, the high numbers of sicknesses and deaths made intervention necessary to avoid losing the African working force. This background explains the rise of biomedical interventionism in the region, that took the form of a call for medical assistance and led to the development of the discipline of tropical medicine. In 1902, the Escola Medicina Tropical (EMT) was set up in Lisbon, specializing in sleeping sickness, later followed by the initiative of the Asistência Médica aos Indígenas (AMI) in 1926.

These issues, in a nutshell, are what Coghe’s book investigates, not forgetting that the relationship between Portugal and Angola was determined by the strategies of the Third Portuguese Empire, from 1822 to 1975, when, after India (the First Empire) and Brazil (the Second Empire), politics shifted towards concentrating on the trade and exploitation of its African colonies. The author makes an argument against the commonly held opinion that Portuguese colonialism was exceptional and isolated by emphasizing the circulation of international knowledge and actors between countries and empires in both Europe and Africa.

Coghe first discusses the emergence of depopulation anxieties and population politics in Angola around the turn of the nineteenth century. His second chapter considers the multi-faceted practical efforts to check and cure sleeping sickness in Angola until the end of the First World War. Next, he lays out the debates leading to the establishment of the AMI program in the interwar years. In the fourth chapter, he examines the work of doctors as “field demographers” and population experts in tropical Africa. Step by step, he demonstrates that the focus of the attending medical supervisions on sleeping illness shifted toward a focus on children’s health care, with the underlying presumption of a strongly negative image of African motherhood. In the sixth and final chapter, the author goes beyond medical interventions and emphasizes the spatial dimension of European population politics in their colonies in the first half of the twentieth century. Many Angolans migrated to neighbouring countries, either forced to work on the coffee and cacao plantations in São Tomé and Príncipe or in the mines in surrounding countries, among other reasons, and this problem of migration produced conflicting views between the Colonial Ministry in Lisbon and the central government in Luanda.

The archival material Coghe found in different places was of overwhelming abundance and he repeatedly states that although medical assistance is generally considered to be a “tool” of the colonial empire to control the health of its workers, this view should be cautiously modified. For instance, he found that medical doctors often manipulated their reports on the health situation, hiding their dependence on local intermediaries’ expertise to obtain better results with other types of medication and treatment. Practitioners of local belief resisted European methods which seemed to be opposed to their own interests. Coghe makes the effort to read beyond the narratives contained in archival documents and his suggestions about the role of local medical knowledge are quite revealing.

He equally documents that this medical system was not specific to Portuguese colonization; instead it was a trans-colonial phenomenon. Coghe observes intra-imperial differences and addresses their common strategies for exploitation, modernization of the medical service, colonial actors, debates and policies in other parts of the colonial world. Of particular interest are his arguments against so-called Portuguese exceptionalism. He opposes the influential thesis, developed by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, concerning the unique character of Portuguese colonialism as constituting a big interracial family, living peacefully together. Coghe argues that, in Angola, this ‘harmonious’ family refers to a special situation. In the first place, there were also many unattended white children of degradados parents, of convicted criminals deported from Portugal, often with their families. Until 1932, Angola served as Portugal’s ‘imperial prison’” (p. 193) and the convicts lived in physical and moral misery at the margin of the colonial society, mistreating the local population. Also, Coghe questions that the number of people who were officially identified as mestiços was, in absolute numbers, high compared to other colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in urban areas:

These [high] numbers, however, do not necessarily indicate any special Portuguese propensity of ‘racial mixing’, a long-standing accusation against the Portuguese, and as the Estado Novo would start claiming in the 1950s [….] Gerald Bender has argued that the number and percentage of mestiços in Angola was not exceptional for African colonies when compared to the high number of whites and considering the imbalance in the male-female ratio across the white population. Moreover, definitions of mestiço (and their official number) varied greatly between actors and over time, as they oscillated between somatic, race-biological and cultural criteria, partly depending on political purposes (p. 193).

In his epilogue, Coghe discusses the eventual fear of overpopulation, never a reality in Angola. On the contrary, the country was one of the least heavily populated in sub-Saharan Africa, therefore, in the early 1960s, Portuguese migration reached unprecedented heights, many taking refuge from the rigid dictatorial rule in the metropole. In his closing sentences, Coghe points to the high fertility rates among the local population notwithstanding the long war period after independence from 1975 to 2002, explaining that Angola has one of the highest fertility rates in the world until today.

Coghe’s well-documented study on health in Angola is recommended reading for medical historians, historians of Lusophone Africa, or indeed anyone interested in health strategies in Angola and former African colonies. Furthermore, in my opinion, his observations could also be relevant to those interested in historical novels, in which some characters obviously suffer from sleeping illness, without mentioning it as such, for example, Arnaldo Santos’ A casa velha das margens (The Old House at the Margins, 1999), set in the nineteenth century. Coghe’s cautious interpretation of colonial archives, his detailed understanding of facts and his overall critical tone outlays many controversial issues in health policies in a Portuguese colony in the past, connecting them to the international networks of knowledge at that time.

Interview: Ohad Reiss Sorokin on Alfred Binet, ‘intelligence’ and failed experiments

Ohad Reiss Sorokin, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia who recently completed a PhD at Princeton University. He received a commendation in this year’s History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for his essay ‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)’. We spoke to him about his interest in Binet and other research.

History of the Human Sciences: First of all, I wonder if you could briefly introduce your broad research interests, including your PhD project “‘I [Suffer] Unfortunately from Intellectual Hunger’: The Geistkreis, Desire for Knowledge, and the Transformation of Intellectual Life in the Twentieth Century”?

Ohad Reiss Sorokin: I wrote this essay a few years ago before I started working on my dissertation. The only thing that ties them together is that the dissertation is also a history of the human sciences but from a very different perspective. My dissertation deals with the ‘Geistkreis’, which was an intellectual circle that was active in Vienna between and 1921 and 1938. It was a meeting place of young philosophers, economists, lawyers, sociologists, psychologists, and art historians. What I argue in the dissertation is that they created this Geistkreis, in order to combat the reigning intellectual environment of Vienna at the time, which is known to be the “mandarin” culture. They tried to create a more open discussion culture that does the human sciences in a way that is not subjugated to the natural sciences, on the other hand, and is not completely metaphysical and out of touch with the empirical evidence, on the other.

HHS: Now to move on to your essay, ‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)’: who was Alfred Binet, for what is he most famous and how does your article on his work depart from the existing scholarship?

ORS: Binet is a very very famous figure in the history of the French psychology and in experimental psychology. He is most famous for the Binet-Simon test, which became the blueprint for the modern IQ test. That would be his main contribution. But that’s just one aspect of his work. He wrote so much, his bibliography is huge and he worked on many aspects of psychology. He did work with geniuses and people who could make complex calculations in their head to see how they thought. He was also a playwright. My work focuses on the 1903 book [L’Étude expérimentale de l’intelligence [“Experimental Study of Intelligence”], which was not exactly ignored but I argue that there was something very significant there that people have missed.

HHS: From what scientific contexts did the concept of ‘intelligence’ first emerge as a scientific object?

ORS: That is not an easy question to answer because we have a concept of intelligence from at least the Renaissance or even earlier. I focus on a very, very specific concept of intelligence that we talk about now, when we talk about intelligence, which has to be with intelligent tests, it has to do with the ranking of people according to their potential for intellectual achievement. This concept was created in an intellectual context in which empirical psychology became a lot more important in the late mid to late nineteenth century. It was a context in which such a concept was needed in order to sort students in a much more democratized education system.

HHS: And how did Binet understand ‘intelligence’?

ORS: The concept of intelligence I just described, that Binet developed in his 1903 book, has to do with personality, it’s called the personality type psychology of intelligence, which is like types of functions, holistic intellectual affinity/taste capabilities that can be described but cannot be ranked on a hierarchical scale. This is the kind of work that Binet does with his daughters in the 1903 book. He later developed a scale and its goal was to differentiate between what in English is called the ‘feeble minded’ and students who could actually succeed. Later on when he thinks about what was done with his intelligence test, especially in the United States, he never meant to create a number that you can sort people according to, but a scale to be used only in a specific context. It’s plausible that he never meant to do it, but he did nonetheless give the tools that allowed other people to do it.

HHS: What was the significance of Binet’s experiments on his daughters and, specifically, of the failed experiment you discuss?

ORS: The book is is quite interesting. There are definitely other books like that but it’s definitely not something you would see today in any of the natural sciences of psychology. It’s a big collection of experiments described from beginning to end, with all the details included, that he conducted with his daughters for many years. And, at least the way he presents it, he didn’t have a specific goal in mind, other than to study the intelligence of his daughters – whatever this means – and he tries many things. What I emphasize is that a failed experiment can teach us sometimes more than a successful one, especially if the experimenter reflects on the failure, then he can explain to us what he was looking for, he can explain what he didn’t get with the results. Then we can better understand the epistemic object or the thing that he was after that he did not discover. This is, to my mind, the key to understanding the most successful experiments which we just hear were successful.

HHS: What were the implications of Binet conducting experiments outside a laboratory setting – including his discussions of ‘outside noise’ and ‘distractions’ – for his understanding of intelligence?

ORS: I think the interesting thing is that he does not reflect so much about that, if I remember correctly. At the time he was working and was eventually the head of the experimental psychological laboratory in the Sorbonne so he had access to all the machines and instruments that were required but he does not reflect much about the effect of taking those instruments outside of the laboratory. He does, however, get very much annoyed by the fact that he doesn’t have adequate conditions in his home. So I would say as an answer to the question is that he has two subjects that can sees roughly every day, for many, many years which is something that it’s really difficult to duplicate in a laboratory setting. He has all the instruments and he exposed all the norms of laboratory science by remarking on the infringements of the norm that happens because he was working outside the laboratory. If it was just in a laboratory we wouldn’t know, for example, that sound isolation is important to measure intelligence because it’s not obvious, it hasn’t come from the concept that you need to isolate the subject. So in this book he makes these norms explicit and that’s what I found interesting about it

HHS: Why did Binet part ways with British associationism?

ORS: British associationism was, at the time, one of the leading theoretical frameworks for understanding the mechanics of the mind. Binet, who was an autodidact, read all the major works by John Stuart Mill and others, and at first took after them. During the time he was working with his daughters he discovered a number of phenomena that he could not square with the assoociationists’ passive understanding of consciousness, most important among them is, of course, “attention”, i.e., our mind’s capability to willfully focus on certain inputs and ignore others. This break with the British tradition helped him to articulate the need for a theory of the active mind. Intelligence is one way to think about it.

HHS: What role did time measurement devices play in Binet’s research?

ORS: I use the analysis done by Jimena Canales in the book Tenth of a Second. Canales argues that measuring things to the 10th of a second became such a crucial element of science in general in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It became like a symbol for science in a way. What I argue in the article is that at the beginning of that book it seemed like Binet measured things just out of duty. He’s a scientist so he needs to have a number somewhere. We know that in modern psychology that the mind is tied with time, it happens in time not in space so therefore it follows to measure time. There are tools for that and there’s a concept for that. But you can find time marks for tests that have nothing to do with time. He doesn’t comment on the time, he doesn’t explain why it is important that some took longer or shorter amounts of time.

But then, at some point, he changes, and I argue cautiously that the change is not necessarily a conscious one. At some point he asked the girls to write sentences. He defined the sentence according to their quality, quality in terms of whether it was a descriptive sentence, a poetic sentence or an imaginative sentence and so forth. He measured how much time it took for them to produce each kind of sentence. But then it is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. He compares the different times it took to each girl to perform different tasks. He has time as a way to compare the performance, but he does it in a way that makes no sense, because he himself defines the tasks as diffrernt. He doesn’t explain why he does it but in the paper I argue that this is the blueprint for the notion that we have today that doing something faster is an indication for greater intelligence. I mean to cook an egg is faster than to write paper. It says nothing about the persons cooking eggs or writing papers. That’s basically the argument.

HHS: How is the difference between the two concepts of intelligence Binet outlined in 1903 and 1905 conventionally characterised and how do you understand the relationship between them? Why do you claim that the concept of intelligence outlined in his 1903 book should be seen as a ‘major ontological leap’?

ORS: These are two separate questions, I think. The first one is easier to answer because usually scholars treat the 1905 publication as introducing Binet’s concept of intelligence because in this iteration of the concept intelligence becomes measurable and hierarchical. Those two components are “missing,” or better, not yet in existence, in 1903.

For the most part scholars either treat the1903 concept as a deficient concept on his way to create the, “fully developed” 1905 concept. Or they ignore it altogether because they don’t think about it as a work about intelligence, but as a work about “personality types”. I don’t remember seeing a good account that explained why he called it intelligence nevertheless in 1903.

I was trying to draw attention to the fact that there are some similarities between the two concepts. It’s difficult, I don’t think it’s impossible, but it’s difficult to find in other major works on intelligence from the time period. It is the idea that intelligence is subjective, in the sense that we measure or look at the intelligence of each person separately. It is not about a philosophical or general concept of intelligence. It’s immaterial – not about the size of the brain or the density of the brain or anything like that – and yet it’s empirically observable.

It’s not something that you learn from a conceptual analysis of any sort. Instead you need to take people to the lab or make an empirical examination or make them take a test. The combination of those characteristics is already there in 1903.

I wouldn’t be the first to argue that Binet has a very eclectic method. This constellation of characteristics is the result of his eclectic method and it’s an ontological leap in the sense that it creates in the world an object that did not exist before. The idea that we each have a specific thing that was like an organ but immaterial and yet is observable with particular methods.

HHS: I began by asking you about your PhD project and wondered if in conclusion you could say something about where you hope your research might lead in the future.

ORS: I’ve been working on the dissertation about the ‘Geistkreis’ for four years now and with time I realized that what I found so attractive about this circle is that they are almost an embodiment of the idea of desire for knowledge. I’m interested in how knowledge and desire survive together in the realm of professional humanities, in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. I’m about to start a postdoc position in the Institute for Advanced Studies of Culture at the University of Virginia and I hope to follow this thread.

Interview: ECR Prize 2022 winner Harry Parker on the regional survey movement

Harry Parker (University of Cambridge) is this year’s winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and winning essay ‘The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain’. Congratulations to Harry whose essay will be published in full in a future issue of the journal.

History of the Human Sciences: First of all, I wonder if you could briefly introduce your PhD project ‘Popular auto-ethnography in Britain, c. 1870-1940’ and describe how this essay relates to that larger project?

Harry Parker: The essay comes from what I think is probably going to be the third chapter of the thesis, which broadly looks at various attempts within the human sciences across the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to turn the anthropological gaze inwards. I do that through looking at a series of surveying projects across the periods that enrolled non-specialists to become observers of their own culture.

I begin in the 19th century, when anthropology in particular was more oriented towards the question of the origins and the composition of the national community. I look at one of the first large scale projects to try and attempt this, which was known as the ethnographic survey of the United Kingdom. As a component of that I’m particularly interested in folklore collection, which  was a major part of that project. I then look at the photographic survey movement, which was running more or less at the same time (around the 1890s). And then I jump ahead a bit to the interwar period to look at regional surveys, which seemed to absorb much of the energies that those earlier projects set loose. The other case studies are also focused on the interwar period and look at early attempts to do community studies. So that’s the ‘auto-ethnography’ bit.

The ‘popular’ bit comes from my training (if you can call it that) as a social and cultural historian of modern Britain. Some of the work that I’ve most admired has used the archives of social sciences to try and understand what we might call its vernacularization: how social science concepts were being employed in everyday life. My project isn’t so much about vernacularization per se, but I think that some of the projects that I’m looking at offer a way into understanding how people of various kinds grappled with the question of what it meant to obtain a perspective on one’s own culture.

HHS: What was the regional survey movement and how do you treat its ‘amateurism’ in your analysis?

HP: A regional survey was a technique for studying the social world developed by the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes. The way it worked in practice was essentially as a mass data gathering exercise. Practitioners of the survey involved themselves in collecting information on everything from the climate of the region to major industries to population. It was an attempt to create a total knowledge of a place.

The amateurism of it actually played quite an important role in the way that it was promoted. Writers on regional survey tended to stress that you didn’t really need to have any specialist skills in order to do a regional survey. In fact, they almost thought it would be better if you didn’t. They conceived it very consciously as a civic or participatory exercise. The survey was, in an important sense, both a social scientific endeavour – trying to create useable knowledge – and a form of social practice – trying to reunite people with their communities.

I’m also interested in the way it related to social thought in Britain at the time. As many historians of sociology have pointed out, many of the distinct innovations or problematizations within social thought tended to come from outside of what we might think of as the sociological discipline itself. This seems to be especially true in Britain, where sociology institutionalized rather late in comparison to elsewhere in Europe. Amateurish social inquiry seems to me to be a significant current within the interwar period, where lots of proto- or quasi-sociological work was being done, not necessarily by professional sociologists but by social workers and reformers.

HHS: Why do you claim that the regional survey movement could be understood in relation to the discipline of ‘social anthropology’?

HP: Anthropology is undergoing a pretty significant moment of transition right at this moment. It’s a moment when something like the modern ‘culture’ concept is coming into being, the idea that cultures are discrete, bounded systems of affinity that can be made knowable via the work of a field worker. Although most of the regional surveyors didn’t conceive of themselves as anthropologists what was striking to me is that they seemed to be articulating many of the same problems. Namely, they were keen to stress that social inquiry should be a field science or something that should be done by a kind of participant observer, someone who’s embedded within the culture, but who also also has to try and gain a detached or scientific perspective on it.

HHS: Who was Patrick Geddes? How did he understand society/social ‘types’ and how was this reflected in the survey method he developed?

HP: Patrick Geddes was a rather eccentric and idiosyncratic thinker. He operated across a range of different disciplines. He was at various points, a botanist, a biologist, a sociologist, a geographer, a town planner. He started his career studying biology under Thomas Huxley. Increasingly, over the course of the 1870s and 1880s he became interested in how one might apply evolutionary theory to the social world. In biology, he was particularly interested in this question of cooperation among organisms and that seemed to underpin a lot of his thinking about society. He developed – and this in large part owed to the influence of a lot of French thinkers, including Frédéric le Play and his followers – he developed his model of the ‘valley plan of civilization’, where he delineated seven distinct social types that he saw as the basis of modern civilization. Much like in his biological studies, he was interested in how those social types were engaged in processes of cooperative adaptation. The task for the regional surveyor was to understand the balance of those social forces within the industrial city.

HHS: How did Geddes conceive of ‘modern life’ and its relationship to ‘pre-modern life’?

HP:

He took up an interest, in particular when he was studying cities, with what he called paleotechnic and neotechnic forms, which I think he intended as a play on the way that archaeologists and anthropologists were writing about paleolithic and neolithic ages. Although he conceived of his paleotechnic and neotechnic forms as being of much more recent origin. The paleotechnic city was powered by steam and the neotechnic city was powered by electricity and oil. He was trying to seek out possibilities for social and environmental progress within what we now know as the moment of the second industrial revolution.

HHS: How did the regional survey movement sit in relation to the broader contemporaneous autoethnography movement? Why do you believe that this approach – ‘the exhortation to “begin where you are”’ – had such traction at this historical moment?

HP: The interwar period is sometimes seen as a moment of of introspection. It’s a moment of imperial contraction. It’s a moment within culture where Greater Britain themes are being replaced by little England ones, if you like. Those developments seem to have prompted some kinds of renewed attempts to try and understand the British nation anthropologically. Jedy Esty’s work on high modernist writers like Woolf and Forster and Eliot, for instance, whom you might think of as these rather metropolitan characters, shows that by the 1930s are turning inwards to invoking and representing the ‘imagined community’. I think the regional survey picks up on some of those themes. It’s a method for trying to get people to rediscover their community. Geddes wrote about the survey as a sort of recuperation from war, a sort of convalescence.

HHS: Though you seem to express some skepticism about that in the paper…?

HP: Geddes was never particularly clear about exactly what a survey might involve. He was much more interested in what its effects might be on civic life. His followers who took up the survey project in the interwar period seemed to take from his ideas what was convenient for them or what suited their own political attachments or intentions.

HHS: You discuss Geddes’ use of visual metaphors – what metaphors did he use and what do they reveal about his approach to observation?

HP: When Geddes wrote about surveying being a convalescence from war, one of the things he was particularly concerned about was this kind of inertness to one’s environment.

In trying to promote observation as a social good he was trying to  define a form of it that would allow the observer to rise above their acculturated self to transcend their inherently limited or partial perspective. The first metaphors he used were the metaphors of the child and the tourist. This was about trying to get at a raw visual experience, to access a dehabituated form of vision. At the same time, he also was interested in the survey as this total apprehension of the region. He called this synopsis. He also used visual metaphors that related to viewing things from above or on high: the hillway traveller or the airman. He was particularly interested in flight as a way of apprehending space.

HHS: In the interwar years, who were the regional surveyors and what was their relationship to the local cultures they studied?

HP: They were a rather heterogeneous group with some divergent interests. They included regional geographers (regional geography was the dominant approach to geography in the period), town planners, antiquarians, amateur naturalists and a core group clustered around the Sociological Society ( relocated to a new group of organisations called Le Play House). They all had slightly different approaches to what a regional survey was. The Le Play House group was probably the most tourist-like. Especially from the 1930s onwards, most of their work involved organising field trips in Britain and across Europe to conduct regional surveysBut other projects were much more committed to the survey as a civic project. There were surveys in Manchester and Liverpool, for instance, where the survey did seem to operate more through the organs of civil society, through local naturalist societies and civic societies of various kinds, like the Workers Educational Association and other bodies committed to civic improvement.

HHS: How would you characterise the political orientation or aims of the regional survey movement in the interwar years? For example, how were notions of community, democracy or ‘good citizenship’ articulated in discussions within the regional survey movement?

HP: The political orientation of the regional survey is hard to characterize partly because of the movement’s heterogeneity but partly because it was never very explicit about what its politics were. Some writers on regional survey even seemed to claim that the survey was a means of of transcending politics as such. They never had an explicit analysis of class and were very much opposed to doing that. If they had a conception of what an ideal region might look like they were probably reliant on what we might think of as a rather conservative conception of an organic community. Although interestingly, in the interwar period that notion resonates with parts of the left as well.. There were some advocates for regional survey who would probably have considered themselves ethical socialists. They were drawing on some of the thinkers that had inspired Geddes, like Ruskin, but also Kropotkin and his  ideas about mutual aid. I suppose that’s probably where their idea of community was coming from.

HHS: It seems people involved in the regional survey movement grappled with tensions between the part and the whole, the specific and the general, the social and the geographical – how did those tensions play out in practice? Could this perhaps be linked to a point you make at the end of your article that they paid little attention to the national question? You talked earlier of a notion of an ‘imagined community’ but if the imagined community isn’t a nation but is something smaller, more micro, what then is it that they’re imagining?

HP: I would say that they never really came up with a satisfactory answer to that question. The idea of the region comes from Geddes’ engagement with French geographers and it partly comes out of his bio-social approach, in which he’s conceived the survey as a study in human ecology. The region plays the role of a rather ill-defined ‘environment’. That was certainly how many of his geographical followers understood the region. In some of his other writings, Geddes would more tightly define the region as a central city surrounded by the countryside on which it relied for its resources. He borrowed there from Auguste Comte: this is a Positivist ideal of a world of autonomous city states. In practice, regional surveyors were operating at a much more micro scale. They liked to begin with small rural parishes and so on, but generally the aim was always to work up to something they imagined as a ‘region’. Part of what they were doing, and there were a number of advocates of regional surveys who wrote about this, was assuming that they shouldn’t start with a predefined notion of community or space in which they were conducting their investigation. This was something that had to be worked up from the ground.

The region would emerge from doing the survey, rather than the other way round.

What I think is interesting about that is the way it departs from other autoethnographic projects emerging in the interwar period. So something like Mass Observation, which looms large in histories of interwar social science, is much more oriented towards the nation. This I think is mainly because it had a different conception of what the observer was supposed to do. M-O’s founders liked to claim that they were turning everyone into anthropologists of their own lives but in another sense they were also committed to a much more modernist data gathering project in which observers would function as these kind of human antennae that would report back to a national mainframe. So really the main task of doing the analysis and forming social theory would happen at the national centre rather than in the field, whereas the regional surveyors were committed to a project of knowledge production at the fieldwork site..

HHS: Finally, where do you hope your research leads next?

HP: In the next part of the PhD project I’m going to be thinking about early attempts at doing community studies. At the moment I’m looking at one rather experimental community self-study project in a place called Brynmawr in Wales.

More broadly, I’m interested in histories of the field sciences, and the possibilities of anthropological archives for illuminating these.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The interview was conducted by Hannah Proctor.

Review: Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory

Michael Pettit, York University, Toronto

Heather Love, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)

In Underdogs, Heather Love offers a densely argued, at times counterintuitive, and yet highly persuasive rereading of how her own field of queer theory relates to its own intellectual past. Love argues queer theory, despite its professed deep historicism, is in denial about its own history, much to its detriment when it comes to making both theoretical and political interventions. She offers Underdogs as something of a remedy to this collective amnesia. In her telling, queer theory as an anti-humanist humanities field is predicated on the notion of rupture: its leading practitioners see it as a field with neither a true academic parent nor a comfortable disciplinary home. Queer theory (and theorists) always stands alone, outside, without friend, kin, or even community. Love identifies this widespread sensibility with the field’s proximate roots in the radical oppositional politics of gay liberation, the women’s health movement, and especially 1980s AIDS activism. In this political crucible, the field disavowed any kinship with earlier social scientific, “empirical,” studies of sexuality (whether of the human animal or other species). Most importantly for Love’s story, queer theory denied its debts to mid-century, observational, qualitative, microanalyses of social interaction. Yet these sociologists of deviance profoundly informed how queer theorists understood both (social) normativity and their own outsider status as intellectuals. Her book seeks to excavate these lost linkages to challenge and enrich contemporary queer theory.

If Underdogs pivots around making uncomfortable kinship between deviance studies and queer theory, Love astutely traces how these two fields operate with very different politics of representation. Contemporary queer theory is predicated on the disruption of all norms and foundations. A profound, skeptical destabilization of all received notions is the field’s primary political intervention. In contrast, mid-century sociologists of deviance sought to uplift alternative forms of social life by making them legible. They related the minortized group to the majority through practices of immersion at the level of data collection and (thick) description as a mode of analysis. However, their sociology continued to traffic in postwar commitments to value neutrality. They staged this not through quantification but by adopting the methodological persona of the cool, hip, outsider observing a foreign scene. A later generation of queer theorists dismissed mid-century sociologies of deviance as hopelessly mired in normative assumptions and compromised by the demands of maintaining neutrality at the expense of explicit political commitment. In short, the sociologists of deviance sought to normalize the subversive, the countercultural, the stigmatized by representing them and their rituals of the world where queer theorists revel in their perennial outsider status as folks who forever operate under the sign of stigma.

Love’s book consists of a series of close and illuminating readings. This starts with her critical engagement with Eve Sedgwick’s highly influential reinterpretation of Cold War affect theory as a relevant framework for queer scholarship. Given the ubiquity of affect theory in the humanities, Love offers a timely reminder of how profoundly odd the reproachment was and remains. Erving Goffman with his theoretically light but richly conveyed ethnographies looms large over much of the book. He comes to serve as an archetype for the sociology of deviance as a body of knowledge and embodied persona. An intriguing chapter on “Just Watching” shows the surprising affinities between radical constructivist sociology and essentialist ethology when it came to their observational practices by juxtaposing Niko Tinbergen’s turn to human observation through his 1970s interest in autism with Laud Humphreys’ controversial, covert ethnography of male homosexual encounters in public restrooms. Perhaps Love’s most compelling case is her analysis of the Black American science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany’s relationship to queer theory. Delany entered the academic critical theory canon through historian and gender theorist Joan W. Scott’s influential reading of a key passage in his memoir The Motion of Light in Water (1988). In the passage, Delany relates his first visit to the Saint Mark’s Baths in New York City in 1963 when he became aware of the existence of a gay community. Writing at the height of the linguistic turn, Scott’s reading underscores the impossibility of an immediate, universal, transhistorical experience of identity, arguing instead for the mediating, reconstructive power of language as a mode of representation which structures consciousness and even the most inmate of identities. Scott exemplifies queer theory’s demand for disruption and destabilization, the critical humanities’ emphasis on interrogating the very categories of identity rather than populating texts with varied experiences of them. In contrast, Love reads Delany’s considerable writings on the changing sexual and political economy of New York City as a vivid exemplar of mid-century urban ethnography in the sociology of deviance mode. Throughout the book, Love plays with the dialectics of seeing but not being seen, of watching and (not) judging.

Love’s book also raises pertinent and disconcerting questions about why queer theorists and social psychologists have been so drawn to affect as a meta-theory for the past twenty years despite their very different political commitments. Certainly, Sedgwick offered an unfaithful reading of this psychology. However, critics like Ruth Leys have rightly point out how affect theory smuggles in with it deeply problematic notions about biology, universalism, and especially intentionality into critical, humanistic fields. Adding Goffman to the genealogical mix does interesting things to this debate. Despite their innumerable differences, queer theorists, the sociologists of deviance, and contemporary social psychologists all share the conviction that they are the smartest person in the room capable of detecting the cognitive failures of the rubes. It suggests these fields remain overly committed to their own coolness both socially and cognitively. As Love artfully demonstrates, this conviction has been as damaging to the kinds of interventions queer theory ought to make as it has been to social psychology. Adopting Goffman’s cruel coolness as the perennial outsider risks veering into the knowing smugness of the smartest kid in the room who conveniently directs the hermeneutics of suspicious at everyone but themselves. Denying the “evidence of experience” as another foundationalist trick means foreclosing oneself to experience of others. It results in a disposition both unkind and uncharitable.

I found Love’s book a challenging but inspiring read. It raises, if perhaps inevitably does not answer, important questions about how to create good relations between empirical research (both ethnographic and archival) and critical theory. In part, her book challenges a prevalent assumption in the humanities where theory takes precedence over method. Without succumbing to the methodolatry so common in many social science fields, Love’s genealogy problematizes the ways in which Theory is often left unresponsive and ultimately unresponsible to the world. Debunking queer theory’s origin myth that it was born whole cloth out of the AIDS crisis leads Love to challenge necessary alignments of the field’s activism with “paranoid” readings of (medical) authority and anti-foundationalist epistemologies. Underdogs is an insightful book for those seeking to repair the rift between the critical humanities and empirical social science.

Review: Evolution of Desire

Cynthia L. Haven, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018)

Michael C. Behrent, Appalachian State University

“How is a philosophy embodied in the man who espouses it? … How does a man’s being—the sum of his knowledge, experience, and will—‘prove’ his knowledge? Can we ever devise a philosophy, even a theory, wholly apart from who we are, and what we must justify?” (144). These are the questions that drive Cynthia L. Haven’s engaging biography of René Girard (1923-2015), the French scholar whose influential studies of mimetic behaviour, violence, and scapegoating proposed a complete reinterpretation of religion and a comprehensive theory of human nature and society. The nexus between thought and life promises to be a particularly fruitful vantage point for assessing Girard’s thought: unlike so many of his generation, particularly in his home discipline of literary studies, Girard’s interest was not in how texts “functioned,” but in what they described. “I’ve always been a realist,” he once asserted. “I have always believed in the outside world and in the possibility of knowledge of it” (127). Drawing, perhaps, on this claim, Haven reconsiders Girard’s thought from the standpoint of its interaction with the “outside world” that shaped it.

Haven’s book is not a conventional biography, objectively recounting its subject’s life history. It is, rather, a whimsical exploration of Girardian thought, a play in which René Girard is the leading but by no means solitary actor, and in which the biographical narrative is interwoven with more chronologically disparate episodes. Haven, moreover, incorporates herself into the story, using her relationship with Girard, as well as his family and friends, to explore his character and trace the multiple ramifications of his thought. Though undoubtedly biographical, the precise subject of her book is difficult to pin down. It is not, strictly speaking, an intellectual biography, rigorously focused on the conception and development of Girard’s most distinctive ideas. At moments, it becomes a study of academic self-fashioning, examining Girard’s successive appointments, academic politics, and professional jockeying before his ultimate consecration as a superstar. Frequently, Haven’s style can only be described as hagiographic—not simply because it is laudatory, but because she presents Girard as a visionary whose wisdom and insight are instrumental to grasping humanity’s current condition. Though Girard’s life is the book’s core, it bristles with digressions—an excursus on the medieval papacy (when discussing Girard’s native Avignon), a slapstick account of Jacques Lacan’s disastrous trip to Baltimore (at a conference organized by Girard), and meditations on 9/11 as a world-historical confirmation of Girard’s intuitions about violence and sacrifice.

Beneath these intriguing quirks lurks a comprehensive and quite definitive narrative of Girard’s life and career. He was born in 1923 in Avignon, France, where his father worked as a curator at the Palais des Papes, the edifice that attests to the city’s brief stature as a seat of medieval Christendom. During the German Occupation, Girard moved to Paris, where, following in his father’s footsteps, he studied at the École des Chartes, the national school for archivists. After the war, he played a role in launching the Festival d’Avignon, which has since become of one France’s most cherished annual cultural events. The turning point in Girard’s youth was his decision to seize an opportunity to teach at Indiana University in 1947. While enjoying the United States’ postwar prosperity—a far cry from his depleted and dilapidated homeland—Girard taught French and trudged his way through a history dissertation (devoted to American attitudes towards France during World War II). Not until he was fired for failing to publish were the rigours of the American academic system impressed upon him. Girard learned his lesson: after a brief stint at Duke, he was hired by Johns Hopkins, where he published a suite of literary papers, before completing, in 1959, his landmark study of mimetic behavior in literature, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. This essay not only secured his academic reputation, it also coincided with a spiritual watershed in the young professor’s life: as he was completing the manuscript, Girard underwent a conversion experience, leading him to become—for the first time—a practicing Roman Catholic, while also leaving him brimming with thoughts that he would flesh out in his theoretical writings.

In 1966, Girard leveraged his growing reputation to host a symposium at Hopkins, entitled “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” which provided an American showcase for cutting-edge French thinkers associated with structuralism—though in retrospect, the event is often seen as the first flowering of post-structuralism or post-modernism. Girard, who viewed these currents as a “plague” (124), was, as Haven aptly notes, “both a child of this new era and an orphan within it” (122). Not long after his subsequent move to the State University of New York at Buffalo, Girard published his definitive statement, Violence and the Sacred (1972).In this work, he argued that scapegoating was the mechanism through which humans successfully purge themselves of their tendency towards destructive violence (rooted in mimetic rivalry), and that sacrifice was the institution through which the initial scapegoating was both revived and managed. The book’s success led to ever-more prestigious academic recognition (Hopkins redux, Stanford, the Académie Française), a series of books teasing out the (notably theological) implications of Girard’s core thesis, and the establishment of Girardian studies as a self-standing subfield (of which the series in which Haven’s book was published—“Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture”—is one example). In 2015, at the age of 91, Girard died at his home near Stanford.

Haven offers a panoramic view of Girard’s impressive career and his bold and influential ideas. But, knowing more about his life, are we expected to understand these ideas any differently? Haven implicitly acknowledges the appropriateness of this question, as can be seen in her quest to find a biographical basis for Girard’s signature concepts, particularly scapegoating and victimization. Was Girard’s thinking provoked by the tondues de ‘44­—the French women accused of “horizontal collaboration” with German men, whose heads were shaved by Resistance forces before they were paraded and publicly derided by throngs celebrating France’s liberation? Was he influenced, rather, by his encounter with racism during his brief stint in North Carolina? In this vein, Haven briefly entertains the claim, advanced by a close friend of Girard’s, that Girard may have witnessed a lynching—even if, ultimately, she rejects it. Or was Girard’s theory ultimately purely intellectual, a merger of his intuitions about mimetic rivalry in literature with his extensive readings in the field of anthropology? Haven dangles each of these options before her reader as possible explanations, without ever committing to a particular experiential matrix as the primary font of his thought—or even committing unreservedly to the claim that such a matrix exists.

This reluctance to clinch the relevant contexts of Girard’s theory accounts, in part, for Haven’s unwillingness to take a stand on what the ultimate significance of Girard’s oeuvre really is. She convinces us that he matters. But Girard’s thought is so consequential, she implies, that it is not necessary to pinpoint its import. For example, all the modern instantiations she cites of Girard’s theory—the Jim Crow South, South Africa under Apartheid, and 9/11, to name a few—are presented in ways that effectively depoliticize them. For Girard’s readers, this is hardly surprising. His theory emphasized the fundamental commonality between the many forms of “sacrificial crises” (that is, the eruptions of violence that can only be ended by scapegoating). Though fundamental, victimization and sacrifice attest, for Girard, to the eternal return of the same in human affairs.

“I am convinced that history has meaning,” Girard once remarked, “and that its meaning is terrifying” (128). Yet while Girard was no doubt interested in history, he was far less concerned with historical change—that is, with the ways in which social structures, political systems, and ideologies might alter and transform unchanging anthropological truths (the one exception being Christianity, which he saw as an escape hatch from the implacable dynamic of human violence). The primitive horde, the Dionysian sparagmos, the sans-culottes crowd, and the Southern lynch mob were so many variations on a common transhistorical theme. This view was reinforced by Girard’s insistence that the choice of a scapegoat could only be arbitrary: it is because every human is to blame for the species’ penchant for violence that no one human can be deemed more guilty than the rest. Yet few interpretations of the French Revolution, American race relations, or 9/11 claim that the victims of these events were randomly chosen. This reductive tendency in Girard’s thought is carried over into his biographer’s analysis: in reflecting on his theory’s relationship with the world, there is little that could not be construed as instances of scapegoating or related phenomena.

More attention to the distinctiveness of Girard’s thought, rather than its capaciousness, would be welcome in Haven’s account—especially since, in her expansive research, she has found material that more narrowly delimits Girard’s uniqueness as a thinker. In an interview, the philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy gives her three reasons why Girard’s work is often ostracized by certain intellectual circles: 1) Girard believed in God; 2) he believed in the human sciences; and 3) 1) and 2) are the same (179). Perhaps this is where Girard’s true significance lies—in his attempt to wrest a world-historical justification for Christianity from the violent fate to which human nature (as he sees it) seems condemned, as much in primitive times as at present.

While Haven’s efforts to explain Girard’s thought may be more suggestive than satisfying, the portrait she paints of Girard is nonetheless a convincing one. She offers a rich and evocative account of his life, situates his work in historical context, delineates his intellectual persona through extensive conversations with friends and colleagues and, along the way, suggests that Girard represents, if not an exemplary life, at least an exemplary mind—one that, by so breezily sweeping aside so many modern assumptions, sheds a paradoxical light on the modern world.

Review: The Maternalists

Shaul Bar-Haim, The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) ISBN 9780812253153

Katie Joice

During the last two years, we have had ample opportunity to reflect on the capacity of the state to care for its population: to warn us of imminent harm, to nurse us back to health when danger strikes, and to show compassion when the worst happens. As Shaul Bar-Haim skilfully outlines in his introduction to The Maternalists, for several generations,ever since Margaret Thatcher began to shift responsibility for the care of the vulnerable and dependent back onto the family, ‘the nanny state’ has become an epithet of right-wing scorn. Those who mourn the unravelling of the post-war settlement may be hoping that the collective suffering of the pandemic has exposed the need for a more interventionist, ‘motherly’ politics, one which fully compensates for human frailty. Bar-Haim’s study of maternally-minded psychoanalysts, and their influence on post-war social policy, is therefore a timely one, in which questions of theoretical inheritance open onto a series of urgent debates about our own historical moment.

Bar-Haim’s story begins in Budapest during the 1920s, where Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s protegées, advocated a radically new style of analysis. Ferenczi was the yin to Freud’s yang, or as Jung, another of Freud’s rebellious students, might have put it, the anima to his animus. Whereas Freud practiced with cool, paternalist detachment, Ferenczi fostered affection, mutuality, and intuition in his clinical relationships. He encouraged patients to revisit the traumatic experiences of earliest childhood, and famously cradled them in his arms, claiming that there was ‘progression in regression’. By shifting the analytic focus away from the Oedipus conflict and phallocentrism towards the sensuous bond between mother and infant, Ferenczi opened up new terrain for analysts of an egalitarian, emancipatory bent. Infancy was characterised here both by vulnerability to trauma and an original psychic freedom, a halcyon period before the oppressive norms of civilised society achieved their grip. Ferenczi surrounded himself with a group of gifted young intellectuals, including Michael Balint and Geza Roheim, the founder of psychoanalytic anthropology, and later had a profound influence on the Scottish analyst Ian Suttie, who also objected to the Freudian ‘taboo on tenderness’.

The relationship between mothering and the human sciences in the twentieth century – in which Mother features as Origin Story and Causal Principle – is hugely complex, extending from the idealisation of matriarchal religion in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess to the development of a laboratory-based attachment theory. By Bar-Haim’s own admission, this book teases out one micro-history from an intricate tapestry, arguing that a set of Ferenczian legacies within inter-war psychoanalysis anticipated the specifically maternal disposition of the British welfare state.

The Maternalists’ central chapters explore the rehabilitation of the ‘primitive’ psyche and ‘primitive’ mothering, in the work of educationalist Susan Issacs, Roheim, and Suttie. Issacs challenged Piaget’s theory of developmentalism, in which the child’s psyche was equated with that of the ‘savage’. A follower of Melanie Klein, and a member of the anti-colonial movement in inter-war Bloomsbury, she proposed a synchronic model of mind, arguing that at all ages, and within all races, magical and animistic ideas exist alongside rational thought. Roheim’s work is placed in dialogue with that of Bronislaw Malinowski, who had ‘disproved’ the universalism of the Oedipus conflict in his study of the matrilineal society of the Trobiander Islands. Roheim undertook fieldwork in the Aboriginal communities of central Australia with the intention of refuting Malinowski’s claim, but changed course when he observed the psychological benefits of matriarchal culture. Aboriginal life, he concluded, was characterised by ‘indulgent mothering’, the development of a weak super-ego, and pacifism; a corrective to the ‘sadistic’ mothering of modern Europe. Similar arguments were advanced by Suttie in The Origins of Love and Hate (1935), which posited the existence of an archaic pagan community, in which the mother-child bond formed the basis of sociability. In Suttie’s account, monotheism, modernity, and the fixation with ‘progress’ were begot by the envious and destructive patriarch, embodied in Freud himself. The autocratic and bellicose paternalist state is never invoked in The Maternalists, although elisions are sometimes made between the maternal and the parental polity. It is worth noting that the psychology of the fascist patriarch was being excavated in works such as Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality well into the 1950s, and that reactionary forms of maternalism, including pro-natalist policies, were in turn associated with authoritarian governments. A post-war suspicion of toxic masculinity, as well as the exaltation of mother-love, perhaps explains the peripheral role of fathers in the case-studies of D.W.Winnicott, the theme of the book’s penultimate chapter.

The book’s argument hinges on its final section, a discussion of Michael Balint’s psychological training with British GPs in the second half of the 1950s. In this illuminating but little-known piece of post-war history, Ferenczian theory was translated into social practice. A significant number of family doctors (including many prominent figures in the Royal Society of General Practitioners) joined Balint groups in this period to deepen their understanding of the doctor-patient relationship. Balint believed that what many patients seek when they visit the GP is regression to a state of infant-like dependency. Anyone who has had the experience of their symptoms mysteriously disappearing after a visit to the local surgery will understand something of this notion, and of the concept of doctor ‘as drug.’ There is also something refreshingly queer about Bar-Haim’s description of middle-class, middle-aged, GPs shape-shifting into loving mothers. In radical contrast to the pressured, consumer-focused approach of twenty-first century medicine, Balint disputed the idea of a medically objective diagnosis, suggesting that both the description and treatment of illness should be an unhurried, inter-subjective process. This is akin to a phenomenological, rather than instrumentalist, account of disease, which blurs the boundaries between physical and psychological medicine. Bar-Haim goes on to suggest that as a section of male GPs began to display maternal capacities in the consulting room, real mothers took on greater responsibility for liaising with the state’s agents, including not only doctors, but social workers, psychiatrists, and teachers. In these various ways, the act of mothering became integrated into the smooth functioning of social democracy.

This brings us to the lived experience of mothers, which the author is careful to distinguish from the theoretical constructions of his book’s protagonists. One of his literary touchstones is historian Carolyn Steedman’s memoir of post-war childhood, Landscape for a Good Woman, in which she makes the striking claim: “I loved the state because it loved me.” For Steedman, the state compensated – with milk, orange juice, library books and free education – for what her mother could not provide. As well as underlining the huge redistribution of wealth and ensuing social mobility that took place in this period, we are reminded that a state with maternal capacities frees flesh-and-blood mothers to be imperfect, or even inadequate, which is precisely what makes welfarism a moral issue for the Right.

We return then to the broader issues raised by the book’s enfolding of inter-war psychoanalytic theory with post-war state interventions. Histories of maternalism inevitably leave political, sociological and philosophical questions in their train. Most obviously, where do we stand with regard to this aspect of our past, in an era when so many forms of ‘care’ have been shredded and privatised? What role, if any, remains for psychoanalysis, now marginalised within NHS practice? The example of Balint groups is compelling, but histories of the role played by analysts in the construction of the welfare state obscure the contribution of radical British socialists to Atlee’s sweeping post-war reforms. This latter tradition advanced an ethic of mutual care using theoretical sources quite alien to psychoanalysis. How should the state compensate for the reproductive labour of women, for the dependence engendered by dependants? Is there a future world in which mothering, and early childhood, could be a period of psychic liberation, a counterpoint to the constraints of industrial time? And finally, is the ‘maternal’ – and the forms of sustenance it offers – bound up with the messy biological and psychological experiences of womanhood, or is it a transferable, rational good?

Review: Social Science for What?

Mark Solovey, Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the ‘Other Sciences’ at the National Science Foundation (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2020). 398 pp. $50.00 (pb). ISBN: 978-0-262-53905-0.

Lucian Bessmer, Harvard University

Social Science for What? is a remarkably detailed history of the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1945 to the late 1980s that makes a compelling case for the influence of the Foundation on American social science. Those familiar with author Mark Solovey’s Shaky Foundations will recognize the care that he has put into presenting an account built on rich archival materials to “follow the money” in order to show the impact of what he calls the “politics-patronage-social science nexus” (10-12). Where Shaky Foundations examined how the Ford Foundation, the U.S. military, and the NSF shaped the social sciences, Social Science for What? delves deeper into the NSF in an attempt to address a gap Solovey identifies in the literature: the role of civilian agencies as patrons of social science. This in itself makes this book an important contribution to the large body of work on Cold War scientific patronage, which generally focuses on the relationships between science, the military, and intelligence agencies. But the more ambitious claim of Social Science for What? is that the NSF played a significant part in positioning the human sciences as participants in the “unified scientific enterprise” (12). Solovey argues that mimicking the methods and epistemic justification of the natural sciences may have enabled the social sciences to carve out a tiny redoubt in the NSF, but ultimately it created barriers to their health and development, disincentivizing the most beneficial aspects of these fields.

The book’s ten chapters offer a roughly chronological investigation of how stakeholders of the social sciences, both inside and outside of the NSF, sought to legitimize a collection of fields that were treated with skepticism at best and as a menace to American society at worst. Solovey crafts each chapter around a person, a set of legislative proposals or controversies, or the shifting organization and priorities of the social science division leadership at the NSF. Chapter 1 sets the stage with the first efforts to create the NSF in 1945. During the post-war period there was tremendous enthusiasm for science (and especially physical science) in the United States, creating an opportunity for prominent figures in the scientific community to advocate for additional federal support for basic physical science. Many of the most influential people spearheading this effort, such as Vannevar Bush, science advisor to President Harry Truman, doubted the relevance and rigor of the social sciences, but calculated lobbying led to the reluctant inclusion of the social sciences in the NSF, on the grounds that these fields were a nascent branch of a unified science. Chapter 2 follows Harry Alpert, the head of social science efforts at the NSF during the McCarthy era. In a time when social science was under intense scrutiny, Alpert chose a pragmatic approach to champion social science, described by his successor Henry Reicken as “underdogging” or “allying one’s cause with stronger others, in this case the physical and biological sciences” (56). Chapters 3 and 4 show how this further cemented the strategy of proponents of the social sciences at the NSF from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, with a continued effort to attract funding through the proximity to other more respected fields at the Foundation. Many scholars opposed this positivist approach, instead calling for a defense of social science through a demonstration of its unique strengths. Despite this criticism, leaders at the NSF sought to maintain legitimacy through scientism, actively working against attempts to separate from their aspirational peers such as the creation of a separate National Social Science Foundation (130). Chapter 5 shows how the combination of financial austerity and opposition from legislators in both the Democratic and Republican parties in the late 1960s and 1970s created a hostile environment for social science research at the NSF. Emblematic of this period was Senator William Proxmire’s “golden fleece,” which he awarded to the federal research that he saw as the biggest waste of taxpayer money – often NSF-supported social science research (146-155). Chapters 6 and 7 highlight the emphasis the NSF put on the “hard wing” of social science. This included “big science” work like the National Election Studies, and projects that incorporated economics methods and theories (195, 256). Chapters 7 and 8 bring us through the massive cuts to federal support of social science during the Reagan era, further driving the NSF to supporting only the “hardest” social science research.

The two final chapters directly address the through line of the book: The NSF played a major role in the post-war ascendance of a positivist case for the social sciences, one where research is objective, non-controversial, and above all, scientific enough to be a part of a unified scientific community. Those controlling the NSF’s purse strings perennially sought legitimacy through association with more respected fields, a choice that ultimately weakened, rather than strengthened, social science. Solovey closes with the recommendation that social scientists should seriously consider advocating for a separate national foundation. He acknowledges how unlikely it is for such an effort to succeed but argues that we should not make excuses “for resigned acceptance of the status quo” (316). This is a compelling argument, and this history of the social sciences at the NSF is strong evidence that the scientism approach has failed, but it is unclear who Solovey is trying to convince. He points to Congress and the NSF itself as obstacles to such a foundation, but what about rank-and-file social scientists?

Social Science for What? includes portraits of those in or closely tied to the NSF who were true believers in the unity of science, those that promoted scientism despite their private beliefs, and examples of the exclusion of left-leaning social scientists from decisions on the future of the NSF. An important part of this story is the choices made by departments that prioritized the “hard wing” of social science to legitimate themselves, and their legacy through the students that they trained, which could be addressed more explicitly in this study. Social Science for What? is an excellent book, and one that I am glad to have on my bookshelf, but it leaves open the question of where a new National Social Science Foundation would fit into existing efforts to buttress nuclear age social science. Perhaps the implications of the NSF’s impact on these fields further reinforces how patronage moulds social science, but are the biggest barriers to a better social science Congress, the NSF, and private sources of funding? I left this book wondering that if social scientists must abandon the positivist argument of their contribution, does the path forward involve convincing the people with the purse strings or should we rather convince our colleagues?

Review: The Sense of Movement

Roger Smith: The Sense of Movement. An Intellectual History (London: Process Press, 2019)

Sonsoles Hernández Barbosa, University of the Balearic Islands 

The Sense of Movement addresses bodily perceptions of movement over the last four centuries. The work begins by presenting philosophical debates about movement as a vital force which emerged in parallel with the birth of modern science in the seventeenth century, linking these with modern notions about the operation of the human brain. As the author points out, the study of movement and its conceptualisation involves setting up a dialogue between current and past understandings of the sense of movement.

Although The Sense of Movement begins with these reflections about the operation of the world of the senses connected with the scientific revolution in the seventeenth-century, some of its arguments reach back much further in time, specifically to the Aristotelian classification of the five senses. The very use of the expression ‘sense of movement’ implies a direct confrontation with the Aristotelian philosophical tenet, which held that movement could only be understood in relation to the sense of touch. Indeed, the extent to which we can refer to a sense of movement that is independent from touch is one of the main issues addressed by the book. Many of the historical difficulties raised by this issue are to do with the fact that the sense of movement and that of touch cannot be pinned down to a specific organ, insofar as the skin covers the whole body. Today, however, a conceptualisation of the senses that goes beyond the five traditional senses, including the perception of pain, temperature and even time, is widely accepted.[1]

Smith, whose areas of specialisation straddle the fields of philosophy and the history of science, argues that it was around 1800 that philosophy began to address the issue of human movement, when muscular motion was first recognised as a specific sense, distinct from touch. Charles Bell, who in an 1815 work referred to muscular sense as a sixth sense, played a pioneering role in this development. In another section of the book, however, Smith argues against the independent study of both senses – touch and movement – stating that the history of touch cannot neglect movement as a sense. In this, he follows the recent arguments of philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe, who considers movement part of the sense of touch. Thus, while in some parts of the book touch and movement are jointly considered, in others Smith makes a clear distinction between them.

In addition to the problematic distinction between the senses of touch and movement, the book deals with two additional thorny conceptual issues, ‘kinaesthesia’ and ‘proprioception’, which are not always used consistently even today. The former was introduced by the neurologist H. Charlton Bastian in the 1860s as a synonym for the ‘sense of movement’ but Smith prefers to use the term to refer to the ‘conscious awareness of one’s own movement’ (p. 193); ‘proprioception’, on the other hand, is used to allude to what the neurophysiologist Charles Scott Sherrington calls ‘the sensory nervous system, largely but not necessarily functioning without conscious awareness, central to the coordination of movement and posture’ (p. 10). Kinaesthesia, therefore, would imply conscious movement as opposed to proprioception, which involves a rearrangement of posture and movement that not always engages conciousness. As Smith points out, if we accept the existence of an embodied psyche this conceptualisation leads to an unsustainable dualism between body (unconscious) and mind (conscious) (p. 202). It is perhaps for this reason that other authors, in contrast with Smith, have preferred to understand proprioception as the perception of our muscles and internal organs.[2]

A final related aspect, which also hampers the imbrication of movement into traditional conceptualisations of the senses is the embodied conception of all sensorial impressions, which implies that all sensorial experiences mobilise more than one sense. In the same way that vision is embodied, the sense of movement does not depend solely on the muscles, but also on other mechanisms, such as retina images, the inner ear, tendons, joints, skin and other tissues, which means assuming the synesthetic character of all sensorial experiences.

Smith’s history of the sense of movement is a history of ideas. As such, the subject of study spans a number of fields, notably the history of science, the history of philosophy and the anthropology of the senses. The book is divided into fifteen independent chapters that could have been assembled into various sections in the table of contents, especially because some common threads readily come to mind, for instance that which links the postulates of natural science (Chapter 2) with thoughts on causality developed by natural philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Chapter 5).

The mechanist consideration of the concept of force as movement – for instance through the principle of action-reaction – allows the author to situate this concept at the root of evolutionist ideas, thanks to the assumption among naturalists that living beings are subject to the same laws that rule over Nature . The application of this principle to the human body and the understanding of the process of evolution undergone by it emerged in the fields of naturalism and physiological studies (chapters 8 and 9). As a way of example, Herbert Spencer’s study of the phylogenetic evolution of the human body suggested the sense of touch, which includes muscular tension, as the most primitive of the senses, from which the rest of the body’s sensorial capacities derived.

Muscular effort, understood as an active force that poses resistance to events was a concept shared by scientists and idealist philosophers. The seminal nature assigned to the sense of movement in the development of the foundations of the self is a central aspect in philosophical thought that threads through the book, from Berkeley’s (Chapter 3) and Condillac’s (Chapter 4) empiricism to idealism (Chapter 7) and the phenomenology of perception (Chapter 14). Smith’s book shows that Enlightened philosophy introduced the will as a key element in the capacity for motion. Will is no longer considered dependent on the activity of the soul, but emerges from ‘la faculté de vouloir’ (p. 76), which idealism developed further as the idea of causal action (‘the Deed’) as a source of knowledge (Chapter 7). Chapter 10 specifically focuses on psychological reflections around movement.

Chapters that consider the cultural implications of movement are of special interest, for instance chapters 12 and 13, which link the perception of movement and mountaineering and contemporary dance, respectively, in connection with the idea of the individual as an active agent (Chapter 11). This amounts to a dialogue with the cultural history of the history of the senses, although Smith explicitly states that his intention is not to take a cultural history approach to the history of movement.

Overall, The Sense of Movement is a key contribution not only to understand the sense of movement but also as a general reflection on the senses more broadly. From the perspective of the history of ideas, it is a fundamental text to understand the epistemological potential of movement, which tracks a theoretical tradition that acted as a counterweight to ocularcentrism and the consideration of vision as the objective and epistemological sense par excellence.

[1] Phillip Vannini; Waskul, Dennis; Gottschalk, Simon: The Senses in Self, Society and Culture. A Sociology of the Senses [2012]. New York: Routledge, 2014, p. 6.

[2] Vannini; Waskul; Gottschalk, p. 6.