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Seeing is doing, or how social forms know themselves

Seeing is doing, or how social forms know themselves

Ryan Schram
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)
Week of May 12, 2025 (Week 11)

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2025/11

Main reading: Street (2014); Reed (1999)

Other reading: Rio (2005); Viveiros de Castro (1998); Viveiros de Castro (2004)

Week 14: The final meeting in the Medical Foundation Building

We have this room, MFB G60, for Monday, June 2, 3–5 p.m.

• Attendance is voluntary
• Not a lecture
• We can just talk about anthropology, the ANTH major, the Anthropology Centennial at Sydney
• Anthro Society people may come also

If you “take only photographs,” you still “leave footprints”

The observer effect is everywhere: Looking leaves a mark

A scientist’s job is to observe the world in order to understand it. But there’s a problem: Sometimes when you observe something, you change it.

• It’s Thanksgiving and you’re roasting a turkey. The meat in the middle of the bird has to be 165 degrees Fahrenheit. Too cold, and your family dies of salmonella; too hot, and it’s dry. (Also, don’t forget the wine.)
  • If you stick a cold meat thermometer in the turkey, the temperature of the turkey goes down (slightly) as the heat is transferred from the meat to the metal stick.
• Having a healthy blood pressure is important, so you should be screened regularly by a doctor. Oh, but if it’s too high, then the doctor’s gonna talk to you about salt, fat, and wine. Aaaaah! So stressful!
  • It is common for a person with normal blood pressure to read high in the doctor’s office, because of “white coat syndrome”: The idea of being tested raises your blood pressure.
• According to Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, checking the air pressure on your tires with an air pressure gauge will always involve releasing some air, lowering the tire’s air pressure.

The observer effect is everywhere, because by definition, observation takes place in the same universe as the things being observed.

The double-slit experiment

You are in a dark closet with only a flashlight

• Turn on the flashlight and point it at the wall.
• Place a cardboard barrier between your flashlight and the wall.
• Cut a slit in the cardboard to let a little light through.
  • What do you expect to see on the wall?
• Cut another slit in parallel to the first one. Shine on.
  • What do you expect to see now? Will you see:
    • Two slits?
    • Something else?

The observer effect is what makes the quantum world of subatomic particles different from the macroscopic world of matter

You will see something else: A row of dots. That’s unexpected.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a video of it happening.

Pete G, dir. 2016. Young’s Double Slit Demonstration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuaHY5lj2AA.

Credit to Pete G. He’s a really interesting physics bloke.

The double slit sends two light waves crashing into each other, like two swells converging in a bowl-shaped bay, a challenging surf spot (“Wave-Coast Interactions” n.d., fig. 5.10)

The double slit experiment suggests that how we observe light changes what we see. It’s the observer effect.

The collapse of the wave function and our macroscopic reality

In the quantum realm

• At the smallest scales, the laws of nature differ.
  • Gravity is weak; Movement is not linear.
• Particles exist in a quantum state of multiple simultaneous possibilities.
  • Particle locations are fundamentally uncertain; they are in multiple places at once.
  • Possibilities interact (e.g., light waves interfere).

It’s like the double-slit experiment

• Demonstrates the transition from wave-like behavior to particle-like behavior.
• A wave behaves like a particle (e.g., billiard balls) with defined position, velocity, and direction.

Something happens to make classical mechanics possible at larger scales

• Quantum-level interactions induce a transition to the macroscopic world.
• The macroscopic world has its own laws (e.g., momentum, inertia, velocity, acceleration).
• This transition is called the “collapse of the wave function.”
  • Describes the shift from multiple possibilities to a single, actual reality.
  • Under certain conditions, a world of multiple possibilities collapses and there is only one actual world.

It’s the observer effect all over again

• The double-slit experiment suggests that observation influences quantum particles.
• Observation causes quantum states to collapse from possible to actual.
• In the double slit experiment, the light beams diffract and hit each other. This is described as one light beam “looking” at another.¹⁾

Does consciousness cause collapse? Not for physical reality. Maybe social reality?

• Some physicists proposed that consciousness itself causes the collapse of the wave function.²⁾)
  • This idea suggests that the world materializes in response to a thinking mind observing it.
  • This idea has been proven wrong in physics, and its proponents withdrew their proposal.
• But, hear me out: What if conscious observation of the social world causes collapse of the social world—from many possible social formations to just one. 🤯🤯
  • Seeing and thinking about society could select from many possibilities, making one into social reality.
  • Seeing is social action. To look at other people is to act on other people, either as individuals, as groups, or as larger-scale systems.
  • Let’s take a beat here… 🤯. OK.

Actually, we have been before. Sometimes when you go wandering, you end up where you started.

Hale, Jeff, animator. 1972. “Lost Boy Remembers His Way Home.” Sesame Street, episode #408 (November 15, 1972). Sesame Workshop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqPcQeMEnFc.

• Anthropologists are people studying people, but historically insisted that observers and observeds were different.
• Anthropologists write ethnographies, and these ethnographies live on in the world they describe long after the authors are gone. Some ethnographic texts have more authority than the self-knowledge of the people they describe.

But there’s a more general point we can make here

• Everyone is an ethnographer sometimes. All people are observers of each other as a part of interacting with, relating to, cooperating with each other.

Social agency looks different in the quantum realm

In Week 6, I wrote:

[A]ction is always co-performed. It’s not an expression of individual agency. But it’s not the outcome of the normative force of social “rules” either. Bourdieu did not imagine habitus as a sweater for two people, but maybe that’s what social action is. The agent in society is not an individual, it’s two or more people cooperating. That would require a new definition of agency.

Or, as Marilyn Strathern, says: “An agent is one who acts with another in mind” (Strathern 1988, 272).

• An agent has the capacity to anticipate and respond to what it imagines other people see and will do in response to an action.
• The true source (locus) of effective social action is not the individual person but the relationship between two or more people seeing and giving feedback to each other.
• This is not “Melanesian agency.” That was a little ironic conceit of Strathern’s work. She’s inspired by what she learned about how people think and talk in Highlands PNG. This is a theory of agency in general, not one culture or type of culture.

The person is a dividual and an individual

In an essay on Hindu food sharing rules, McKim Marriott (1976) writes:

[T]he pervasive indigenous assumptions of any society, such as Indian notions of the identity of actor and action and of the divisibility of the person, provide bases on which an anthropologist may construct his models of cultural behavior in that society. (Marriott 1976, 109)

He also says,

To exist, dividual persons absorb heterogenous material influences (Marriott 1976, 111)

In her book, The Gender of the Gift (1988), Strathern writes:

[F]or contextualizing Melanesians’ views we shall require a vocabulary that will allow us to talk about sociality in the singular as well as the plural. Far from being regarded as unique entities, Melanesian persons are as dividually as they are individually conceived. They contain a generalized sociality within. Indeed, persons are frequently constructed as the plural and composite site of the relationships that produced them. The singular person can be imagined as a social microcosm. (Strathern 1988, 13)

“Melanesians” are “dividuals” and “individuals”??

Everybody’s talking about personhood

Strathern is talking about personhood. If you think about it, you have probably already encountered the complexity of this idea.

• Fetal personhood
• Embryos as legal persons with legal rights
• Corporations as legal persons with legal rights
• Animals as “fur-babies” and pet owners as “cat daddies”

Modilon Hospital patients and Bomana inmates: What is their personhood?

• Are the patients at Modilon waiting for a diagnosis or the inmates at Bomana dividual persons?
• Does it matter to you if they are?

Seeing as action in prisons and hospitals

• Consider why, for instance, prisoners at Bomana do not want their relatives to visit too often, because they will see them face to face. Why?
• Consider what it means not to “find a name” for one’s sickness and suffering. Consider what it means to “go back to the village” when the hospital fails to diagnose, let alone cure, you.

AI acknowledgement

Several slides were generated by the a generative AI tool based on an original text, structuring the main points with second-level headings and bullet points.

References and further reading

Marriott, McKim. 1976. “Hindu Transactions: Diversity Without Dualism.” In Transaction and meaning: directions in the anthropology of exchange and symbolic behavior, edited by Bruce Kapferer, 109–42. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.

Reed, Adam. 1999. “Anticipating Individuals: Modes of Vision and Their Social Consequence in a Papua New Guinean Prison.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (1): 43–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/2660962.

Rio, Knut M. 2005. “Discussions Around a Sand-Drawing: Creations of Agency and Society in Melanesia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11 (3): 401–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2005.00243.x.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1525/9780520910713.

Street, Alice. 2014. “The Waiting Place.” In Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastructure and Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/269/chapter/111426/The-Waiting-Place.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034157.

———. 2004. “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies.” Common Knowledge 10 (3): 463–84. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10-3-463.

“Wave-Coast Interactions.” n.d. Exploring Our Fluid Earth: Teaching Science as Inquiry. Accessed May 4, 2025. https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/physical/coastal-interactions/wave-coast-interactions.