Blog by Professor Justin Paulson
The following is a lightly-edited transcript of Prof. Justin Paulson’s address to the Sociology & Anthropology Graduate Student Conference 2017. The conference theme was “Navigating the Social: Intersections and Crossroads”.
I want to begin by saying a few words about navigation in general—for it really is an evocative way to reflect upon our discipline. Navigation is something we all do, though we rarely stop to think about it. To tweak what Gramsci said about intellectuals, we might say that all of us are, in a sense, navigators, even if only a handful of mariners and cockpit crews have that professional function.
Navigation by road, of course, makes you contend immediately with intersections and crossroads, and these concepts have obviously structured much thinking in Sociology and Anthropology. This is why the picture on the conference poster works. It seems to me that intersections and crossroads aren’t really about navigation as such, so much as contending with the results of our own and other peoples’ movement: who’s coming to the crossroads? Why? How have the intersections structured our being-in-the-world? One of my mentors, Jim Clifford, wrote a fine book, Routes, on such issues of travel, diaspora, and contact zones, that influenced my own graduate school trajectory; and most of you were here this morning to hear Professor DiNovelli-Lang’s outstanding introduction that touched on these sorts of themes. But as I try to spend some time every summer as a navigator aboard a small boat on the Salish Sea, it’s marine navigation that I know best—and I think our methods of nautical way-finding, and their histories, have some distinct analogies to some of the methods we pursue in our work as sociologists and anthropologists.
There are two principal functions of navigation: one is to get from here to there. The rather more interesting one is about paying attention to what’s along the way. Even without a long-term destination, if you’re just wandering at sea, it helps to be able to recognize where you are, whether you’ve been there before, and have some sense of why you ended up there.
I’m going to talk about a few practices of navigation with which I’m familiar, but this is by no means exhaustive: the corollary to 'all of us are navigators' is that people have been navigating as long as they've been on the move, which is to say, as long as we’ve been social. There are many ways to do it. In many cases we encounter navigation practices as a learned craft, analogous to any discipline; in other cases, they may be learned quite informally, transmitted in oral histories or as part of a regularized process of inscriptions on the sea or land (this was the research focus of our former colleague Claudio Aporta while he was in the department). As Emma pointed out in her paper this morning,[1] navigation can even be achieved through recognitions of sound. I won’t speak much to such practices because I remain ignorant of how many of them work, and I suspect many of you know much more about these forms of getting around than I do; my point in gesturing to them here is simply to acknowledge that the practices one is trained in are never a comprehensive list of how to do something well. This is a good thing for every navigator to keep in mind.
The first practice I want to speak about is celestial navigation — which we know has been around for thousands of years. A handful of different devices aid in this task, including the sextant and, incidentally, the astrolabe: on the hill behind the National Gallery of Canada you can see a statue of Champlain holding one upside-down, which I hope is an intentional, thinly-veiled commentary on colonial navigation skills rather than an error of ignorance. But if you study the sky where you are, it’s not too difficult to recognize certain stars and constellations, figure out where they should be relative to where you want to be, and use them to help you find your way to or from somewhere. For this to work over large distances, however, requires a grand theory: a bird’s eye view of the planet that, in this case, understands it to be large, round, and finite. (As an aside, for the purposes of navigation, much of this grand theory can be wrong, and of no consequence: the distances between the stars are irrelevant, it doesn’t even matter that the stars move or that the earth travels around the sun rather than the other way around. But what is of no consequence to navigation has, of course, great consequences elsewhere—for religion, society, politics, physics, and the like.) The point is merely that with a little bit of geometry, and a bit of grand theory, you can pretty much know where you are on any planet at any time.
But the grand theory is not enough. What do the coordinates actually mean? It’s all well and good to know that you’ve made your way to 49.73 degrees North latitude, 123.89 degrees West longitude—except that if you don’t know what the context is, you might simply know the position from which you’ll drown. In this case, you would have successfully located the Skookumchuck Narrows above Sechelt, and you probably have a few minutes to get your boat well north of there before the tide turns and the boat is lost. (There’s a photograph in the bar at Egmont, just above the rapids, of a powerful tugboat foundering at that very spot.)
So a navigator’s grand theory is always supplemented by an understanding of local waypoints, markers, and histories. We can get some of these from nautical charts—the reading and writing of which is a specialized practice of transmitted, collective knowledge that can also take numerous forms, from the charts produced by the Canadian Hydrographic Service or the National Ocean Service in the US, to inscriptions or notches on wood, bone, or rock that might designate the shape of a coastline. Either way, you might think of the chart as a co-authored book, read by successive generations, with the little annual updates as similar to journal articles, contributing to keeping the knowledge current. If you write one of these, you're offering your navigational experience to those who come after you. Waggoner-style guides fulfil a similar function. Most navigators forget this, I think: that charts are not merely transcriptions of what the land and water "really are", but they're authored, and are products of experience. (Navigators also forget that charts are products of politics, about which I'll say more in a moment, and that neither our tools of celestial navigation nor the concept of the modern nautical chart are of European origin; they arose out of crossroads and intersections of knowledge throughout Asia and Africa.) But even when you have charts or guidebooks onboard your vessel, most of the navigator's understanding of waypoints, markers, and histories is rooted not in the charts but in what the anthropologists here will recognize as local knowledge.
No navigator worth her salt navigates by sextant alone, or even a sextant plus a chart. The sextant gives you a big picture, but tells you nothing about where you are except your relation to other parts of the globe: how far you are from where you started, and from where you’re going. This can be a useful relation for long voyages, to be sure, but in most quotidian sailing it’s entirely beside the point. Most of the time you just navigate based on what you recognize. If you're traveling somewhere for the first time, and are good at reading charts, you may still be able to recognize local features on the chart and fix your position accordingly. Europeans called such navigation without instruments or celestial fixes 'dead reckoning' (and I imagine others called it something more mundane like 'paying attention' or 'not being dumb'). To navigate with waypoints, markers, and histories, you have to know how to read the water. Know the landmarks. Know where the rocks are. Study the currents and when they shift. Recognize the animals and vegetation in the sea or on shore. (Though, as an aside, climate change has made these sightings somewhat less reliable. Last summer I documented common dolphins about a thousand miles from their normal waters—neat to have them running with the boat, but also rather unsettling.) Know what’s happened here before. Be able to interpret local aids to navigation, whether they were put there by the coast guard this year or somebody’s ancestors long ago. Even with a chart, you have to know what you’re reading. If you don’t know, you ask. And when you’re a visitor to the waters, you have to know that, too, and act accordingly.
Local knowledge is, beyond a doubt, the best friend of the navigator. (Even the Canada Shipping Act, which requires all vessels to maintain an updated library of relevant charts, makes an exception for small vessels in which the navigator has “sufficient knowledge” of local conditions and hazards.) They who seek it out and are paying attention will also be perennially learning; this process is also, I admit, deeply enjoyable and kind of addictive. By contrast, they who do not avail themselves of local knowledge, having one system and being sure of its reliability in all places and times, may navigate straight to a whirlpool or be dashed on the rocks, because local conditions interfered—joining the thousands of vessels at the bottom of the Salish Sea, some of them victims of the weather, but many surely victims of their navigators’ arrogance as well. (This, too, is somewhat analogous to our craft.)
Today, sadly, most navigators use neither celestial navigation nor the “dead reckoning” of coastal navigation, but skip straight to their global positioning devices. GPS (and now AIS) are wonderful aids, and saves the navigator tremendous time, but in their utter reliance on external authority they pose a challenge to navigation as an accumulation of learned and experienced knowledge. No longer a craft to be learned, navigation thus becomes a content delivery system. (I trust you can see the analogy with our navigation of the social sciences.) If I were to have a perennial, cranky complaint in harbour pubs, it would be that there are too many boats on the sea without any crew with sufficient sense of how to read a nautical chart, much less fix their position on it. They don’t study the currents, they don’t know when it’s safe to traverse the rapids, nor how many logs or crab pots they’ll have to weave around at different times of the year. They don’t ask, they don’t learn. They think the sea is theirs, not that they’re visitors on it. They get around on GPS alone. What's lost here? Even under the best circumstances, assuming you don’t end up on the rocks, when you navigate this way you’re not paying attention, you’re not able to think or reflect about how or why you’re on the route that you’re on. You may as well be on land, driving on the road that somebody else put there to get from somebody else’s point A to point B.
Now I’m going to switch gears a little bit to talk in a less circumspect way about navigating the political, though I’ll try to periodically circle back to the way some of these forms of navigation impact our practices, or vice versa.
First, though, I would be remiss, having spent some time talking about navigation methods, not to recognize how these particular forms of navigation can themselves never escape the political. The sea we’re in (I’m still speaking here of a literal sea) is always already political, from the name of the sea itself to what’s included and omitted on the charts. When I first started sailing the Salish Sea, it was called something else, depending on which part of it you were in: the Strait of Georgia, the Straight of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound. In other words, European royalty and explorers. (There are obviously many issues here, one of which is just the implied history, or lack thereof, if naming is associated in our consciousness with discovery.) The renaming of the waters, less than a decade ago, immediately presented a much older place—though most charts still give islands and place names in it (peninsulas, points, bluffs, etc.) the names assigned them by Vancouver’s crew. It is the rare guidebook that identifies places by multiple names, noting the changes over time and why. Our charts are also Mercator projections—that awful stretched map with which you’re all familiar, with its distortion of the poles, in which Africa appears tiny and Greenland appears enormous. It’s useful for a navigator at a very different scale, simply because it lets us navigate by compass: this is its navigational purpose, a flat-earth simplification for getting around the mid-latitudes on a round planet. So it’s great for shipping butter from Cork to Liverpool, or travelling from Victoria to Nanaimo, but it actually has no functional uses as a world map, at least not for nautical travel. (Most of you know that over long distances, the actual straight line is achieved by continuously changing one’s compass heading, not keeping it constant.) So the only function of the Mercator projection on a world map is that it projects European and northern supremacy. It was, incidentally, the politicization of the discipline of geography, the recognition that cartography was a political act, that had a lot to do with its denigration as a world map; and although many of us grew up with a Mercator world projection on our walls, it’s thankfully not used much anymore. I hope mine was the last generation exposed to that, though we do still use it for nautical charts of small regions of the sea and coastlines. One point here is that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater—but we must be cognizant and careful with our cartographic productions.
Our disciplines, Sociology and Anthropology, also swim in a political sea. What I mean by this is that the practice of sociology and anthropology is a political practice, whether we intend it to be or not; and there are short- and long-term political consequences to our work whether or not we understand what we do to be explicitly “politically-engaged.” (Our former Prime Minister reminded us about this in his excoriation of those 'committing sociology'.) Politics outside the academy sometimes puts identifiable hazards in our path, and I'll say something about this in a minute, but first I just want to highlight that everything we do here is political; the political as such is not something we can just steer around.
No discipline of knowledge can navigate around politics. The social field is always already ideological, political, historical. The political and the scientific may be two distinct vocations, as per Weber (I mention this just because this year is the 100th anniversary of Weber’s "Science as a Vocation" lecture; it's also of course the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which terrified Weber, and which also aimed to create a distinctly communist science); but even if you can be a politician without having any scientific credentials—as our friends south of the border keep wanting to demonstrate—science is never conducted in an autonomous space. And ultimately, your vocation, as Danielle pointed out this morning, is about “mapping the social”. And as we’ve already seen, any mapping operation is political.
The politics may interject immediately and obviously, or they may be long-term, slow effects. Think, for example, of the way the name of an island doesn’t strike you as political, though what it reflects in choices and erasures surely is. Much of what appears as natural, or apolitical, or anti-political, is not. Even language is political (which is why I would implore graduate students to learn and research in as many languages as possible).
So we're navigating in and through politics. Often our voyages are political themselves (for instance, any time we critique the actually-existing social world or suggest it can or should be other than it is). The first questions asked by the questioning, perspicacious, aware navigator (not the GPS user, in other words) after "what tools are at my disposal?", should be why are these tools at my disposal? What do they show me, and what don't they show me? What else do I need to know to get where I'm going, and what else do I need to know to understand where I am right now? (What do I need to know just because I'm curious?) Have I been here before—and what should I look for, in order to know that? Do I want to come back in the future, and if I do, will I be able to find my way?
All of these imply a history and a politics that we learn in part by reflecting on our own tools of navigation. How did we come by these? Are they ethical? Did they get here by means I can live with? Did I find myself here by ethical means? (I'm thinking figuratively, but with fieldwork this could be literal.)
As a quick example, I want to say something about my deep antagonism toward Heidegger. I was recently in a reading group in which we read Heidegger’s oft-cited essay on technology. The idea was that this was could be a useful tool for helping us navigate the modern world of technology, machines, and climate change. Now, how did Heidegger come to us? (To use a nautical analogy, is he the chart, or is he the reef?) There is a history here that's very important, too often overlooked, and a politics not only to the production of any tools passed to us by Heidegger but—and this is the important point for our craft today—a politics to reading and using this work as well. Why Heidegger? Why not any number of other scholars writing about the social implications of technology, who weren't unrepentant Nazis? Is there something particular about Heidegger's experience or expertise that makes him particularly able to help us navigate the world of modern technology? And if we reflect on these questions, and still decide the tools are necessary to help us understand where we are in the world today—not a conclusion I would come to, but many do—we still ought to talk about and come to terms with the how and why of Heidegger. (Which we ultimately did in that reading group, to the great credit of the others involved.) The same holds for de Man, Schmitt, and any other Nazis that have found their way into our disciplinary toolkits, and for the theorists developing new tools based on their work. Do we need them? Are there other ways to get us where we need to go? (If looking for a period piece, why not read the anti-fascist Marcuse on technology, instead? Or the more recent work of Donna Haraway?)
When we use some theoretical tools, and not others—navigational tools that are handed down to us—are we using them because we understand them as uniquely capable of helping us steer? Or because we’re lazy? If it’s the latter, our navigation cannot be extricated from the politics of erasure of all the scholarship and navigation not being studied, and it should go without saying that such erasures are usually the work of indigenous scholars, women, people of colour, scholars from the South, and so on. (I’ve also stopped teaching Althusser for this reason: my students challenged me one year as to why we were reading theory written by a wife-murderer, when there’s so much other great work on ideology, the state, Marx, etc. that’s under-studied, little known, and under-appreciated, and I concluded the students were right; and indeed I’ve yet to find a useful Althusserian concept that one can’t get to from another direction.)
We learn tools of navigation under the name 'theory and methods', but these are not a marketplace of ahistorical, technocratic tools that just appear to us on a shelf and from which you take your pick and then apply whatever tools you want, whenever you want, without reflection. (At its best, this is analogous to celestial navigation; at its worst, the myopia of GPS.) Rather, every project of scholarship is a course of travel (we call them courses for a reason!), one that should take you to waters that your out-of-the-box, go-to navigation tools and assumptions are insufficient to handle alone. Part of the point of being in the academy is that we never stop finding ourselves in unknown or uncomfortable positions. Indeed, we steer ourselves there, and learn to either become comfortable in those seas or navigate out of them.
But now to the ways politics puts explicit hazards in our way.
Most of you have heard me or Danielle talk this term about what President Business means for Sociology and Anthropology. I’m not going to say much about him here except to say that there are eras in which, in any particular place, the debates of a discipline, questions of where we’re going and how we want to get there, can take place relatively autonomously from whatever is happening in Parliament or Capitol Hill or the state legislature or wherever else. Then there are times that the university itself comes under attack, or times in which the idea of critical thinking itself is devalued or misunderstood. This poses a serious set of navigational hazards, first to the public university itself. Can we continue to pursue our courses of study independently of direction or management from the state? (We’re doing okay for now; several public universities in the US are not. And now somebody whose textbooks reference dinosaurs on Noah's Ark is heading up the higher education taskforce down there—this has all the ingredients of a major shipwreck.)
But secondly, we find ourselves having to ask whether the tools we’re teaching students are still the appropriate tools for navigating the world outside the academy. In a world of alternative facts, does critical thinking matter anymore? It should, but it seems like we need to find a supplementary toolkit to go along with it. We try to teach argument, and sound logic, but when these are met with smug assertion of counterfactuals, and sometimes violent erasures (and actual violence), what then? Are we leaving students adrift?
Where is society headed, and will our students be able to recognize where they end up? Are they listening to and learning from the right people with the right kind of local knowledges? That may not be us, here, though we ought to be able to give them the the right tools to seek it out and recognize it. Or are they instead taking direction from pundits, cathartic late-night comedy shows, and the Twitterverse (that reinforces a sense of themselves being on course, even if everybody not on the same rhumb line is an idiot?)
In this vein, I admit I don't understand the sudden popularity of “woke"ness, which has overwhelmed my Twitter feed, in which, in its appropriation from its original context, the word "stay" was lost. Rather than the original expression "stay woke”—which I understand to be an imperative to continue listening, with ongoing attentiveness—its association instead with the verb "to be" turns it into an assertion of arrogance: I am woke. He or she is not woke. In other words, now that I have a GPS, I don't need to pay attention any more, and I can lord that over others as my GPS guides me right to that uncharted rock. This really worries me. It's not a matter of being educated vs. being experienced, either; if wokeness is meaningful, it has to be a continuing process of keeping one's eyes open while questioning and paying attention.
A good navigator stays awake, or, if one prefers, “stays woke”—both while on the sea, keeping an eye out for obstacles, and also while ashore, learning about a place and its histories, and reflecting on those things we take for granted.
And will our students know whether we've all been here before? I fear this talk is turning into a list of my anxieties. But I’ll ask you to recall a couple more of the papers presented this morning: Katie reminded us that without history, there can be no memory; Sara, Sarah, and Maryam reminded us, in the last session, of what happens when we lose our memory—with the consequence of steering ourselves in circles.[2] In this vein, I fear that we, in the public universities, don't do a rigorous enough job teaching history—the history of actual politics and events, but also the history of theory. One of the great things about nautical charts is that they show both the dangers experienced previously in any passage, as well the dangers of alternative approaches to any passage. I wish we had something like this for fascism, highlighting that those who came here before foundered because they didn't steer in this or that direction, and showing us exactly the safest course through. But one of the reasons we can't have that kind of a chart is that the changing circumstances affecting the viability of a nautical passage are not of our making: wind, storms, fog, and the like; and so while they're in one sense unpredictable, in another sense they're predictable enough that we can account for them. If we learn how to handle fog, and wind, and storms, and enough about local conditions, we can make safe passage, or at least know when and where to make for safe harbour. By contrast, the sea of the social or the political that we sail in is of our making, at least collectively so. The hazards themselves move, and in ways that are far less predictable.
But they can also be disrupted—not just in the way that engineers in Johnstone Strait, tired of seeing so many vessels strike Ripple Rock and sink, tunnelled beneath it and blew it up. The sea we’re sailing in, the set of passages available or known to us, is the environment built at least in part by the administration, production, and detritus of hundreds and thousands of years of choices and agency and actions. Every passage changed the landscape and the sea beneath it, and so it is here that the analogy I’ve been running with throughout this talk breaks down. This makes passive navigation more difficult, yet reminds us as well that the navigation of the social and of the political is also itself a process of world-making. And this leaves me at least a little bit optimistic.
[1] Emma Bider (Carleton), “Sounding the World: Imagining ontologies as mobile through sound and song”
[2] Katie Warwick (Wilfred Laurier University), “Trains to Nowhere: Rail Transport During the Holocaust”; Sara Abdel-Latif (University of Toronto), Maryam Khan (York), Sarah Shah (University of Toronto), “Intersectional Subjectivities: Queer Muslim positionally resisting binaristic constructions”