Of Disciplined Minds and Disciplined Bodies: On Becoming an Ecologist
Wolff-Michael Roth1
G. Michael Bowen
Roth, W.-M., & Bowen, G. M. (2001). Of disciplined minds and disciplined bodies. Qualitative Sociology, 24 (4), 459–481.
Running Head: Of Disciplined Bodies
1Correspondence should be directed to Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor, Applied Cognitive Science, MacLaurin Building A548, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 3N4; e-mail: .
ABSTRACT
Phenomenologically speaking, the body is the hinge between the sociomaterial world and individual knowing. To illustrate the importance of this hinge in the making of ecologists, we draw on a two-year ethnographic project among field ecologists. Our study shows that becoming an ecologist involves not just the acquisition of skills and conceptual knowledge or just enculturation to a set of practices, such as occurs in university schooling, but also a disciplining of both mind and body, deriving from the physicality of engaging in the fieldwork itself. Becoming an ecologist therefore involves a “disciplining” that mingles the mental and the physical.
KEY WORDS: Enculturation, embodiment, fieldwork, cognition
Gawd, it’s hotter than hell here. All I want to do is lay in the shade and pant…Inside my pocket I measure the temperature at more than 34° C and I’m sweltering. The thermometer on top of the rocks maxed out at 60°C...I’ve consumed more than a liter of water in 3 hours and am completely beat. [FN970705]
Whoa, cold cold cold last night. I slept miserably because I was so chilled. This morning, still drizzly and mostly overcast but, wait, the sun is peeking through a small hole. Looks gray everywhere else though. I checked the lizards (at 8:15) that are usually out. But nobody was visible. It’s 13.4° C in the drawer in the lizard house (where the thermometer rests). My bet is, in 45 minutes there won’t be a whole lot of lizards under shallow rocks. [FN970711]
These two fieldnotes from our work among ecologists provide some indication that ecological fieldwork often involves experiencing considerable climatic conditions and variations. These variations can be particularly stressful when field workers stay at their field sites, often in tents or trailers, for extended periods—sometimes extending into months. Because fieldwork is a central aspect of collecting data for a master’s or Ph.D. thesis, the months and years submitting to the hardships of fieldwork is central to becoming a field ecologist (theoretical ecologists often do little if any fieldwork). Becoming an ecologist involves a disciplining by means of which mind and body become intertwined and domesticated into the scientific discipline. Physical exertion and fatigue often precipitate mental and emotional stress. Heat, mosquitoes, rains, floods, storms, dangers of predators and so forth populate the “tales from the field” (van Maanen 1988) ecologists relate to each other or bring to their interpretation of inscriptions. These periods in the field are often celebrated and recounted in stories of hardship. At the same time, our interviews and analyses of graphing practices show that a thick layer of embodied field experiences mediates ecologists’ understandings of nature and the claims and evidences (such as graphs) which arise from research in the discipline. That is, with the physical discipline comes a practical sense (Bourdieu [1980] calls it “sens pratique”) of how the world works. This practical sense often resists objectification, not appearing in the descriptions and theorizing in the writings of ecologists. In this article we argue that enduring the physical and emotional demands of often solitary fieldwork leaves its mark not only on the actual bodies of ecologists but also on their minds. That is, the formation of “new” ecologists involves not only appropriating the observational and theoretical discourses of a discipline but also considerable physical disciplining in the field. This physical training, we argue, produces the very understandings that distinguish field ecologists from other ecologists and from members of other scientific disciplines. Thus, becoming an ecologist involves more than the acquisition of skills and conceptual knowledge and more than an enculturation to a set of enacted and interpretive practices—the physical (i.e., field-based) context in which these are learned is crucial.
The purpose of this article is to show how the (physical) fieldwork experience shapes the perceptual “lens” brought to nature by ecologists giving them a unique ecological understanding and forming the basis for membership in the discipline. This case study is based on two years of fieldwork study among ecologists during which we served as field assistants in the collection of data and interviewed a range of ecologists as they interpreted familiar (their own) and unfamiliar graphs.
MIND AND BODY
Doing a Ph.D. in a domain such as field ecology is first and foremost thought to be an enculturation into the domain-specific conceptual practices (Delamont et al. 2000; Traweek 1988). Recent research in social studies of science show that scientists’ knowledge is more than just conceptual content and standardized practices; a lot of their knowing resides in the material aspects of the field. For instance, TEA lasers are not just conceptual objects that work in practice as designed on paper (Collins 1982); and PCR is a biochemical technique that requires more than reading procedures in publications and manuals (Jordan and Lynch 1993). A considerable amount of embodied knowledge is required in all scientific fields to produce the phenomena and observations that subsequently are articulated in the form of abstract discourse. Several studies have therefore proposed that science be framed in terms of human and material agency that get intertwined as conceptual and material practices by means of a dialectic of resistance and accommodation (e.g., Gooding 1990; Pickering 1995). The Cartesian split between mind and body has shaped the way we go about understanding what it means to know. Generally, research on scientists at work is concerned with the social or psychological mind, leaving out the body where mind dwells and which, as our phenomenological approach presupposes, is the very condition for knowing in the way we do. Traditionally, psychology and cognitive science theorize becoming a scientist in terms of the acquisition of particular skills and conceptual knowledge, usually via information transfer from some authorized source to the student (e.g., Anderson 1985). Sociocultural and pragmatic theories view the same process in terms of enculturation, a process by means of which the student acquires the cultural codes and ordinary practices of a discipline in explicit (and sometimes implicit) ways (Lave and Wenger 1991; Vygotsky 1978). One school of thought, phenomenology, has emphasized that the body, not just the mind (head), is the fundamental site for all cognition and this view is becoming increasingly important in robotics and bottom-up approaches to (social, psychological) cognition (e.g., Taylor 1993; Wheeler 1996).
From a phenomenological point of view, the relation between conceptual understandings and physical experience is sensible: “One’s own body reveals itself to be the mediator between the intimacy of Self and the externality of the world” (Ricœur 1990, p. 372). Ways of knowing are tied to and arise from the fundamental condition of our being a sociomaterial body in a sociomaterial world. Our bodies are the hinges between that which we experience as inner and outer worlds; it is because of this material inclusion in the world that we acquire knowledge and practical mastery of our surroundings (e.g., Merleau-Ponty 1945). Because our bodies are part of and open to the world, and thus susceptible to conditioning by the material and cultural conditions of the world, they are submitted to a process of socialization (Bourdieu 1997). From an anthropological perspective, too, some biological and cultural differences are mutually constitutive (Gadner 1998) as the practical skills of everyday life (e.g., language, memory, perception, and cognition) are developmentally embodied in the human organism in its neurophysiology, musculature, and anatomy. In this article, we explore the material conditions, and more specifically the physical conditions, of ecological fieldwork as a shaping element in the development of an individual’s disciplinary understanding and reproduction of disciplinary practices.
After providing contextual information for our study, we report on the hardships of fieldwork in ecology and the mental and physical discipline this work requires (Trials of Fieldwork). In the subsequent section (Fieldwork and Embodied Knowledge), we show how traces of the fieldwork show up in scientists’ informal and formal knowledge of ecology. In Ecologists’ Narratives we articulate some ways in which fieldwork shows up as one of the central themes in the narratives that circulate in the community of ecologists. We conclude (Fieldwork: Rite de Passage and Beyond) by arguing that fieldwork is a “rite de passage” (Turner 1979 [1964]; van Gennep 1960 [1906]) that has important functions in the formation of disciplinary understanding, that is, in the practices developed by new members in a scientific discipline.
RESEARCH CONTEXT
Over the past four years, both authors engaged in fieldwork among ecologists and other biologists. As field assistants, we contributed to the data collection of our informants; in an ongoing project, Roth has become an active member of a research team and has spent several hundred hours learning the ropes and collecting data. We also interviewed our informants formally. In addition, we attended formal (local, national, and international conferences) and more informal gatherings (nature clubs, coffee shops, and bars) during which we learned about the research activities we had observed from our participants’ perspectives. As one of our interests was the relationship between field experience and use of formal representations (inscriptions, largely graphs), we also conducted an interview study involving sixteen scientists, mostly ecologists (e.g., Roth and Bowen 2001). Here, we asked them to read/interpret both unfamiliar graphs that we had culled from undergraduate ecology texts and familiar graphs that the scientists had used themselves in their studies and resulting publications.
Our database, apart from our fieldnotes, includes nearly fifty hours of videotapes and audiotapes recorded as our ecologists engaged in their fieldwork, approximately thirty-five hours of videotaped interviews, and inscriptions produced by the ecologists during fieldwork and those inscriptions that resulted from subsequent transformations into articles and presentations. We also obtained drafts and completed versions of theses, some of the drafts containing supervisors’ comments. Further data include formal (recorded, about twenty-five hours) and informal interviews with graduate students about their field experiences, about 680 photographs taken during fieldwork, research articles published by our participants, and videotapes and audiotapes recorded during formal and informal presentations of fieldwork results and thesis defenses. We have extensive records for two participants (Sam and José), which has allowed us to document in minute detail their minute-to-minute decision making related to the mathematical representations of their research objects (e.g., Roth and Bowen 1999b, in press). In this study, we draw a lot of our examples from our work with Sam. Collectively, we logged two months in the field with her—conducting daily fieldwork often beginning at six a.m. until late afternoon and early evenings. We conducted more than fifteen hours of formal interviews recorded on five different occasions during presentations, and obtained samples of her notes, maps, field notebooks, spreadsheets, and anecdotal data—a total of more than six hundred pages. We videotaped her in her field laboratory and while collecting specimens (about ten hours) and recorded conversations with her field assistants during fieldwork (about twenty hours). According to her own and her peers’ accounts, Sam’s statistical knowledge and experience in data analysis put her in a somewhat special position in the field.
Biologists in general and field ecologists in particular experience considerable anxieties as to their relative status as scientists (Kingsland 1995; Mayr 1996). Consistent with the literature, our informants related this status differential to the perceived “hardness” of a field, itself measured in terms of the amount that the phenomena lend themselves to mathematical modeling, and therefore to the ability of the scientists to do the mathematics. Our field ecologist informants generally felt inferior to theoretical ecologists (“This professor showed me that evolutionary [field] biology was actually a science”), who often come from the physical science and mathematics (see also Kingsland 1995). Field ecologists said that they have difficulties receiving funding, being overlooked by agencies and policy makers who prefer to put money into more (politically) promising mathematically oriented projects of theoretical ecologists. Yet our field ecologists (often referred to as “tree huggers”) considered themselves as having much more intuitive (“anecdotal”) knowledge than the theoretical ecologists, who are understood to cull most of the financial resources. The following quote from an interview with one graduate student articulates the tension between mathematically oriented theoretical ecology and observation-oriented field ecology:
Most biologists get much less mathematical training than physicists and chemists, so they are less equipped to deal with complex problems. So it’s unfortunate that people that have intuition and the knowledge of the natural history of the situations are often the same people that don’t have a strong set of mathematical tools. In my experience collaborating with other people, I felt a bit envious of people that had more mathematics training and less natural history. But I am glad that I did natural history because there are a lot of people that do have more mathematics training. But they just don’t have the natural history to be able to understand what are the appropriate questions they should be asking and how to put them in their proper framework. [RP961122]
Field ecologists, who are in the field because of their love of nature, do mostly observational work—although those who have the required background will attempt to make their work as mathematical and statistical as possible. Thus, Sam (the main informant for this article), a doctoral student in field ecology, understood statistics well and even taught a course in the subject. She felt that the use of statistics would considerably increase the credibility of her work. Other graduate students often singled her out as having a particular advantage. Yet Sam felt that fieldwork was her real love and strong point. Each spring, she could hardly wait to get back to the field, where she spent, with few interruptions, her time from late April to mid September. (Her husband also was a doctoral student in biology, spending his summer months in a different site to conduct research.)
TRIALS OF FIELDWORK
At the graduate level, the direct external constraints that form the body in much of schooling (e.g., Foucault 1975), such as ringing bells and being constrained to the same seat, are no longer operative. It is implicit in the cultural practices of field ecology that graduate students enact self-discipline even under the duress arising from the physical and climatic conditions of their fieldwork. In fact, fieldwork and self-discipline are mutually constitutive in the sense that it is in the process of doing fieldwork that graduate students often develop self-discipline, mental and physical. Whereas there is no direct control over the graduate student during this time, indirect control is thus maintained through the evaluation of a thesis in which candidates report on the data they collected. Becoming a scientist (member of a “discipline”) is therefore an autopoietic project that the future scientist has to develop and conclude in such a way that others already part of the community can recognize aspects of themselves in the aspirant. Ecological fieldwork involves hard physical work, often under exacting meteorological and geographical conditions that require physical, emotional, and mental discipline. In addition to the climatic conditions which are endured, dangerous situations and unpredictable circumstances can develop that frequently imperil the lives of fieldworkersincluding those arising from the rigors of being exposed to the climatic elements and the demands of navigating difficult terrain and botanical coverage.
During our fieldwork with Sam, a doctoral student in her third and fourth year of fieldwork (second and third on lizards), the weather changed continuously even in midsummer. There were days when we recorded notes such as “weather is ‘not lizard weather’…since it is cold and occasional splatters. Around 2 p.m. it worsens and is raining quite hard and is windy and cold” [970710]. Within days of those cold spells, we experienced scorching heat and high humidity. Thunderstorms and torrential rains emerged from nowhere, soaking us before we could return to take cover. Black flies and mosquitoes alternated ambushing us at different spots along the trails and at different times of the day; clothing did not seem to be a deterrent for them. The rocky slopes where lizards were found were often steep, and we had to go up and down by means of switchbacks while searching for the organisms in the jumble of loose rocks, gravel, and vegetation. Catching the lizards enhanced these risks as the rapid movement required to do the catching could (and often did) dislodge the insecure rock base one was standing on, causing slippage. During sunny July and August days, the temperature on top of the rocks was higher than the maximum of 60° C shown on our thermometer. Each person consumed several liters of water, if not to replenish completely, at least enough to prevent complete dehydration. Despite those difficulties, Sam often talked about the fact that the physical aspects of lizard research is relatively easy compared to research with other organisms: