Cicilie among the Parisians | antropologi.info

Authoring a PhD continued

Published on March 12, 2008 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Writing

In Authoring a PhD: How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation by Patrick Dunleavy, I’ve found numerous advice on how to structure my work more efficiently. I’ll try to sum some of them up here and give a brief account of how I’m making use of them.
[teaserbreak]
In the previous post, I quoted Dunleavy’s (citation) of what constitutes an intellectual question: You have a starting situation and certain means to change it [or say something substantial about it]. The thesis should focus on your own “value added” which

means keeping a critical eye on the extent to which you have transformed or enhanced or differentiated the starting materials of your analysis (Dunleavy 2003: 31).

My starting material was the environment of East Paris, the slam poetry scene and public debates on what constitutes France and French history, (in addition to a huge amount of literature more or less present in my mind). My starting material is in fact a lot more, but I’ve narrowed it down as I think it’s in these areas I find most of my “value added”.

In Dunleavy’s opinion, a thesis should constitute 75% original material (that means material that is more than just review of literature, I suppose), ant that it’s better to concentrate this “value add” in the core 5/8ths of the thesis. The lead-in and lead-out shouldn’t be more than two chapters each (p. 50-51).

Your thesis title, abstract chapter headings, contents page, preface, introductory chapters and organisers need to highlight, set up and frame the core material… As of your lead-in chapter(s): ‘What do readers need to know in order to appreciate the value-added elements to come in the core chapters?’ (Dunleavy 2003: 52).

The thesis title (p. 200-202)
Dunleavy suggests to write down all the key terms you can think of in various combinations, before and after a colon (p. 202).

Your title should introduce the central analytic concepts used or the major argument themes developed. Normally thesis titles have a colon in the middle… to separate out thematic, analytic or theoretical ambitions on the one hand, and empirical references or limiting features on the other (Dunlavy 2003: 200).

The title of my master thesis was Beyond ethnic boundaries? British Asian cosmopolitans. “British Asians” are of course the empirical as well as limiting feature, while “beyond ethnic boundaries” was meant to situate me in discussion with the classical Ethnic groups and boundaries by Fredrik Barth from 1969. Cosmopolitans signals partly a theoretical ambition (which I’m not quite sure I managed to follow up), but it’s also designating and limiting the empirical field: my thesis are not about all “second generation British Asians”, but a certain cosmopolitan stratum.

In the title Society in the making: The Parisian slam poetry scene and Postcolonial Paris, the first part is again meant to situate my work in relation to a theoretical perspective by Fredrik Barth, this time from his book Cosmologies in the making from 1989. The second part emphasises the empirical field as well as pointing to a certain theoretical take on – to see Paris as postcolonial – as well as what empirical aspect of Paris I’m focusing on.

Dunleavy provides a list of questions by the help of which one can scrutinise the perspective of the thesis:

Does the current title really capture what you have done in your draft chapters?
Does it define exactly the central research question which you have answered? Does it avoid drawing attention to any gaps or deficiencies in your research?
Does your title’s vocabulary include the main theoretical concepts or innovations or themes that run through your research, which are used in the chapter texts and do an important job of work there? Does it signal your line of argument in a reasonably substantive way? Are the words used ones, that you will want to talk about and explain at length, in your oral exam?
Does the title make clear the empirical referents of your research, and the necessary limitations you have set for its scope and approach? (Dunleavy 2003: 201-2).

The first chapter (p. 205-6)
“should set out a small number of intellectual themes stemming from the central question of the thesis” (p. 205). Dunleavy suggests 2- 4 themes, with subthemes. The themes should

run all the way through the thesis, synthetisizing your arguments, setting up and framing your research conclusions, and putting the thesis value-added into sharp focus (Dunleavy 2003: 200).

My main themes, I envision for the moment to be aspects of landscape, architecture and environment, various aspects of identity, colonial connections and cosmopolitanism, and the theoretical issue of the process of creating a society (on whatever level).

The conclusion section of the middle chapters (p. 206-7)
Each of the substantive chapters … should be flexibly linked via their conclusions ot the themes from the opening chapters. … The theme that each conclusion links to should be wholly relevant to the specific materials in the chapter and also adapted to the role which the chapter plays in the thesis as a whole. The job of the conclusions section is to pull the focus away from the research detail, to bring out the chapter’s key findings in a stand-back mode. … Each of your chapters should do a discrete and distinctive job, well signalled from its start, and effectively building the thesis. … Check carefully that the ‘need to know§ criterion is being met in terms of the order of the chapters so that contextual information arrives in the right sequence for readers to follow the analysis at all points! (Dunleavy 2003: 2006-7).

The final chapter (p. 207)

First part:
reprise each of the same themes or theory ideas used to structure the first chapter

the discussion of each theme should be grounded securely in the experience of the middle chapters

focus… on establishing clearly what has been shown by your research, and how it is relevant to your central thesis question and the themes set out at the start

What has been achieved by your research? How much has your thesis moved professional discussion along?

not go … into detailed accounts from the middle chapters. Instead is should compare across those chapters, pulling together their themes and connecting up their key messages

Second part:
group its themes together under broader labels or higher-order issues. …. Open out into a discussion of relevant wider professional debates … considering some viable directions in which future research might go from where your work leaves off (Dunleavy 2003: 207).

My outline-in-progress looks like this per now:
In “Introduction: A night in Paris and the suburbs or how I discovered French slam poetry”, I give a chronological account of a trip from Paris to a suburb and back again, in order to introduce a number of central issues.

In “Chapter 1: Socio-political geography of East Paris” the aim will be to describe the areas of East Paris which have a dual importance in terms of its numerous waves of immigration and the slam poetry scene. Here, I will also introduce the theoretical perspective of inhabitation from Tim Ingold.

In Chapter 2-4 I will look at the slam scene from various perspectives: at one generic soirée, the participants with their texts and finally with an analytical angle on the space created during the session.

The rest of the chapters will provide various forms of contest: In Chapter 5, I will try to discuss what is French about the French slam poetry and what can we learn about French society from studying this milieu. This chapter can perhaps be a bridge between the findings in chapter 4 and the methods discussion in chapter 6.

In “Chapter 7: Postcolonial re-appropriation of French history seen in the light of Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without history” I look at the recent struggle over French history. In Ch. 1, I looked at an appropriation of space (in East Paris by immigrants, street artists…), while here the issue at hand is a parallel appropriation of time.

The comparison I initially intended to do between France and Great Britain is limited to Chapter 8, and here I for the most part intend to highlight the political specificities of the French context, I think…

In Authoring a PhD: How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation by Patrick Dunleavy, I’ve found numerous advice on how to structure my work more efficiently. I’ll try to sum some of them up here…

To formulate a thesis question

Published on March 11, 2008 by cicilie Posted in Anthropological notes, Cicilie among the Parisians

I’ve got one year and six months pay left of my research grant and with the help of organised writing I hope it won’t be a problem to finish in time. But I realise that the writing must be organised this time, so no more writing 140 pages too much like I did with my previous thesis. For the sake of organising myself, I read Authoring a PhD last Christmas (on a black volcanic beach on La Gomera in the Atlantic ocean, so the book is full of dark grains of sand). (Thanks to Mary Stewart for recommending the book on her research blog here).
[teaserbreak]
Manage your readers expectations is the first advice Patrick Dunleavy (2003: 15-16). When I wrote my Master thesis I was so sure I had something interesting to tell, that I couldn’t give a damn about readers expectations… How naïve one can be. This time I’ll follow Tim Ingold’s advise and write more like the swishy swashy pictorial language of We’re going on a bear hunt, and lead my readers on every step through East Paris and her suburbs. In addition to “orienting devices” like headlines etc and “signposts” (indicating the sequence of topics to be handled) (p. 272, 274), Dunleavy suggests an aphorism from Nietzsche so not to forget about the audience during the writing process:

Never ignore, never refuse to see what might be thought against your thought
(Nietzsche quoted in Dunleavy 2003: 134)

When I presented an unfinished article to various readers a while ago, I reminded myself of this quote – in order to handle the at times contradictory feedback I got.

The second good advice I found in Dunleavy’s book was the five components making up an interesting intellectual problem (une problématique, en problematikk), thus how to phrase a thesis question:

1) a goal or objective which can tell how to judge the outcomes, how to see that an improvement has been achieved

2) an initial state, the starting situation, and the resources available to be used

3) a set of operations that can be used to change the initial state and resources (a toolkit of research methods and new date)

4) constraints: designating certain kinds of operations as inadmissible

5) an outcome

Or put differently: “Problematizing your thesis question” means “setting the answer you hope to give within a framework which will show its intellectual significance” ((from Robert Nozick, Dunleavy 2003: 23)

My (preliminary) aim – component number 1 – is to describe and makes sense of a former colonial metropolis as fundamentally marked by its past and present global connections. Thinking about readers’ expectations, I realise that already in this sentence, my choosing of words points in the direction of a specific perspective. Instead of writing just “Paris”, I say “a former colonial metropolis”, for instance…

Component 2: the starting situation and the resources available in an anthropological study I guess must be a specific empirical ground/arena and certain perspectives by which I look at it, in order to generate data and knowledge. I’ve divided the overall aim into a threefold perspective:

i) a microstudy of the creation of a cosmopolitan space: the slam poetry scene

ii) an analysis of the process of inhabitation (from Ingold) in cosmopolitan East Paris

iii) an analysis of France as inherently postcolonial, seen from the perspective delineated by Eric Wolf in Europe and the people without history

The initial states are thus i) the existing slam poetry scene (very mixed in terms of gender, age and social and ethnic background), ii) East Paris (visibly marked by former and present immigration) and iii) the ongoing debates on what constitute France and the history of France, + Eric Wolf’s and similar perspectives on global connections

Component 3: my research methods and new data:

i) observation, participation and filming on about 100 slam soirées → data on the places, audiences, performances, participants… In addition to some “off stage” participation with some of the participants, poetry texts, myspace sites, interviews… + literature on space/place and phenomenology…

ii) observations, hanging around and living in East Paris which give me some idea of how the process of inhabitation can be an appropriation of space. Examples are how the waves of immigration have made their marks on the environment, all the streetart, posers and writings on the wall, and finally the various places, cafés and bars, where the slam is taking place. + literature on performance, oral poetry and…?

iii) to answer the third question, I will draw on my findings from the two previous fields of investigation, in addition to literature and media coverage on the public debates on history and France.

Component 4: the constraints affecting my work, I’ll discuss soon in another dull post on methodology and scientific criteria.

Component 5: the outcome: hopefully a satisfactory description and sense-making of a Society in the Making: The slam poetry scene and Postcolonial Paris…

The final useful point I’ll mention from Authoring a PhD this time, is to try to work out as soon as possible what one will be able to say something about, in order to make a close fit between the question asked and the answer delivered. The author also recommends to formulate the thesis question so as to showcase your own findings, instead of going on and on about other people’s research (Dunleavy 2003: 24-5). That fits well with my aim to write descriptive and swishy swashy, very far away from the language and content of this blog post…

Yes, my research blog is really supposed to continue…

Published on February 20, 2008 by cicilie Posted in Blogging, Cicilie among the Parisians, Post-fieldwork

Oslo one month ago

Three recent events have inspired me to get this blog going again. The last drop must have been a post by the incredibly prolific research blogger Mary Stevens. In her last post, she tells about her PhD viva and her examiners’ interest in her research blog:

One of the things they were particularly interested in – and of which I didn’t make that much in my write-up – was this blog and the specific contribution it had made to the research experience. I talked about the inspiration, in particular C. Wright Mills‘ idea of the research file, and how it helped extend my presence in the ‘field’ into the virtual arena. Overall, they seemed to think that in an ideal world all researchers would be blogging, as a way of communicating their research to their peers and to the general public, and as a means to keep a kind of intellectual diary. Their enthusiasm has inspired me to find some way to carry on, although I suspect in a new form, as I think this blog has outlived its usefulness (as my failure to post over the last few months has amply illustrated). (Read the whole post on Mary Steven’s blog here.)

As I’ve been chronicling my experiencing continuously, I feel I shouldn’t stop now: The strange things happening after leaving the field, when experiences are turned into data and written documentation, are of course as part and parcel of the research process as is the hanging around in Paris-life I was writing about until last summer. But until now I haven’t

The second event spurring me on to continue blogging, was a brief remark from one of my colleagues who recently got back from his fieldwork: “It’s funny how your friends slowly turn into your informants when you get back to academia and start writing up,” he said. How right! That uncomfortable fact is exactly what’s been churning around in my mind for months now, and I feel it’s urgent to voice this phenomenon/experience in a research blog at this stage.

The third event is the sheer joy and inspiration it gives me to read the research blogs from some of the Master students I was teaching in the spring who now are out in the field all over the world: Rakel blogs (with photos!) from Malta, Nina from Cuba and Inger from India (I think she’s a photographer, ‘cos her photos are really incredible)…

Ah finally, there it’s done, my first post for more than three months…

Oslo one month ago

Eerie post-fieldwork experiences: Norwegian Anthropologists’ Facebook association

Published on October 26, 2007 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Post-fieldwork

Facebook hit Norway like a meteorite while I was in Paris (where, by the way, Myspace was the big thing). With 404 508 members, this tiny country with only 4,5 million inhabitants constitute one of the larges regional networks on Facebook (Norway). I still haven’t really discovered what’s so great about Facebook yet (by contrast I got hooked on Flickr immediately and can still spend so many hours immobile in front of the photo sharing utility that my eyes get sore from forgetting to blink and my shoulders stiffen.) Anyway, in my slow and trying attempts to catch up on what everybody here were doing in the spring – while I was watching other people tending other sheep in other valleys (e.g. surfing on Myspace) – I stumbled upon the Norwegian anthropologists’ Facebook association (Norske antropologers fjesbokforening). And what do I find, after a short presentation of the association and a handful of links to informative sites (where of course the incredible antropologi.info by Lorenz is on top)? Yes, a link proclaiming in capital letters: PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION ON YOUTUBE. It’s me, with a poem by the Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe, first in French translation, then a little more comfortably in the original Norwegian version. My mate Lorent who sat next to me, suggested taking over the camcorder when the maître de cérémonie Dgiz introduced me (to my surprise), so he filmed the whole séance.

It’s incredible strange to watch this video now, in my own living room, so removed from Bellevillian fieldwork as I can be. I’ve just come back from the Cinemateket (Scarface, 1933 – the remake, with Al Pacino, is said to be a cult movie for the kids in the deprived Parisian suburbs). It’s a quiet Friday evening. Outside, it’s almost frosty, but the streets were full of people on their way to a party or a “vorspiel” when I cycled through town, like always in the weekends. So, in the middle of this, my typical Oslo life, I get reminded of my own participation in a poetry slam in haut Belleville five-six months ago. It’s funny to see my nervousness, hear the applause, see how I first forget to get the ticket (for a free drink) like so many slammers often do, then how Dgiz smiles after he has given it to me, then, finally, my big smile of relief towards Lorent after sitting down again. It’s funny to be back at L’Atelier du Plateau and this soirée, and it’s incredibly funny – yes, eerie – to have found the link on that Facebook site, inscribed in the heart of this internet community of young Norwegian anthropologists, as an example of participant observation.

Ethnography under colonialism: what did Evans-Pritchard think of it all?

Published on September 14, 2007 by cicilie Posted in Anthropological notes, Cicilie among the Parisians, History, Politics

“When the Government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan asked me to make a study of the Nuer I accepted after hesitation and with misgivings” (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 7).

“A Government force surrounded our camp one morning at sunrise, searched for two prophets who had been leaders in a recent revolt, took hostages, and threatened to take many more if the prophets were not handed over. … It would at any time have been difficult to do research among the Nuer, and at the period of my visit they were unusually hostile, for their recent defeat by Government forces and the measures taken to ensure their final submission had occasioned deep resentment. Nuer had often remarked to me, ‘You raid us, yet you say we cannot raid the Dinka’; ‘you overcame us with firearms and we had only spears. If we had had firearms we could have routed you’; and so forth. When I entered a cattle camp it was not only as a stranger but as an enemy, and they seldom tried to conceal their disgust at my presence, refusing to answer my greetings and even turning away when I addressed them” (ibid. p. 11).

There is no other anthropologist I’ve read so extensively and thoroughly as Evans-Pritchard. I love how he makes reference to his arguments over witchcraft with members of the Azande community. His ethnographic descriptions of situations and even individuals in Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande are so “thick”, that you are allowed judge by yourself whether you agree with his theoretical analysis or not. When I reread The Nuer a couple of weeks ago, my hero disappointed me.

The book is nothing but generalisations – there isn’t one event, one situation, one individual mentioned after the short introductory chapter. Not even his one “constant companion in Nuerland” Nhial (p.10), who must have been indispensable in acquiring knowledge of the fierce and hostile Nuers appears in the text proper. He leaves us with an image of Nuer society as a seamless, timeless whole* devoid of real human beings. But as we know from his own introduction, Nuerland is in full anti-colonial revolt at the moment of writing. And in Evans-Pritchard’s own tent, young and proud Nuer men “endlessly visit”, talking about nothing but cattle and girls (which “led inevitably to that of cattle” :D ) and asking for tobacco without bothering to answer his questions.

Like anyone who’s been through a graduate course in social anthropology, I was of course familiar with the critique. However, my recent interest in colonial encounters gives an extra edge to reading 70 years old ethnographic descriptions by a white Brit in East Africa (Bourdieu among the Kabyle has certainly moved up on my reading list).

“I … never succeeded in training informants capable of dictating texts and giving detailed descriptions and commentaries. This failure was compensated for by the intimacy I was compelled to establish with the Nuer. As I could not use the easier and shorter method of working through regular informants I had to fall back on direct observation of, and participation in, the everyday life of the people. … Information was thus gathered in particles, each Nuer I met being used as a source of knowledge, and not, as it where, in chunks supplied by selected and trained informants. … Azande would not allow me to live as one of themselves ; Nuer would not allow me to live otherwise. … Azande treated me as a superior ; Nuer as an equal” (Ibid. p. 15).

Between the lines of this cold and “objective” ethnography, I read a lot of respect for the Nuers. But how on earth could this brilliantly alert and bright anthropologist not reflect on his own position as employed by the colonial – and so obviously repressive and violent – government. And equally puzzling: how can he treat the fact that he moves around with black servants (not Nuers, of course!) as such a matter of course? From the previous quote it even sounds like he usually treated his informants as servants… (This classical photo from Monica’s blog apparently gives a good indication of his relationship with the Azande).

A student alerted me to the fact that Evans-Pritchard lead African troops against the Italians in Eastern Africa during the WWII (Wikipedia). After seeing the French film Indigènes (see earlier blog post) on how the French colonial troops were treated during the war, I cannot but wonder how my predecessor treated his own soldiers.

*) This seamless whole is in fact what he wanted, as he writes that he wanted to write a new kind of monograph where the development of theory isn’t drowned in ethnographic detail.

“When the Government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan asked me to make a study of the Nuer I accepted after hesitation and with misgivings” (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 7).

“A Government force surrounded our camp one morning at sunrise, searched for two prophets who…