Advantage Outsider

June 4, 2008

photo used by Creative Commons License, by Flickr user OldOnliner

At the beginning of this week I made a presentation at Beloit College for their Cities in Transition Workshop. On Monday night we had a picnic dinner at the pavilion pictured above in Riverside Park. This is a chance to come out an learn learn something about country dancing.. and this was the backdrop to our meal.

That afternoon the topic came up about what is the advantage or disadvantage of viewing a culture from the outside. The consensus seemed to favor the importance of having an inside informant.. or else one risks all kinds of mistakes and false conclusions. That did not sit well with me and I kept thinking about all the ways that an inside informant can be a detriment to really understanding a place or an event.

For example the Islamic hajj. If one were to interview Muslims about their experience, the responses would be mostly a repetition of the pious benefits that Muslims are supposed to get out of the experience. In other words, people pick up the accepted phrases and terms.. and irrespective of what actually happens, they see the event in those terms. So say we could ask a pilgrim: "What was your sense of social relations while in Mecca?" The response would likely be that it was wonderful, all these millions of Muslims worshipping together irrespective of class or race or country of origin. But as I watch videos or see photos of the hajj, I am struck by how powerfully class and national identities are continued throughout the hajj, from the buses to the hotels to the tents set up at 'Arafat. A semiotic reading of the arrangements for the hajj will thus cut against a pilgrim's testimony as to how it felt. There can be difficult questions regarding the adjudication of such a conflict between outside and inside views.. but there is no obvious answer, especially once it is appreciated that human beings are lousy critical interpreters of their own world.

A second example would be the presence of class divisions in the American landscape. Americans are largely unconscious of class, and given that fact they are unlikely to reach for class as an explanatory concept for unequal neighborhoods. If we could interview an American while passing through a landscape that she knows well, and ask her about the changes in appearance that we are witnessing, then the answer may well hinge on individual choices or even the racial composition of the neighborhood.. or perhaps this American would deny any substantive change in the landscape. It would be the height of folly to accept this insider view instead of entrusting interpretation to the critical tools of an outsider.

I would of course welcome insider interpretation in almost any situation.. so I am not disparaging the idea of listening to what people say they are experiencing. But I am questioning the uncritical acceptance of an insider view just because they are insiders. There are mental traps connected with being an insider that are very difficult to spring.