Experience Subjectivity
Alan Peshkin
Keynote Address
Much of the acknowledgement of subjectivity's inevitable
place in research comes in reaction to statements such as this
one made by the famous German sociologist, Max Weber:
I am ready to prove from the works of our historians that
whenever the man of science introduces his personal value
judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases. (1946, p.
146)
For most of the history of research, in education and in
other fields, something resembling that statement was believed.
In the last several decades there have been numerous reactions
against its sentiment. They come from varied sources, including
from palentologist Stephen J. Gould who in talking about
evolution and the Gal pagos Islands observes that:
Agassiz, a colleague of Darwin, said so little about the
Gal pagos because his visit made preciously little impact
upon him. The message is familiar, but profound
nonetheless. Scientific discovery is not a one-way transfer of
information, from unambiguous nature to minds that are always
open . It is a reciprocal interaction between a
multifarious and confusing nature and minds sufficiently
receptive (as many are not) to extract a weak but sensible
pattern from the prevailing noise. There are no signs on the
Gal pagos Islands that proclaim: Evolution at work. Darwin,
young, restless, and searching, was receptive to the signal.
Agassiz, committed and defensive, was not.... I do not
think he was free to reach Darwin's conclusions, and the
Gal pagos Islands, therefore, carried no important message
for him. Science is a balanced interaction of mind and nature.
(1983, p. 118)
And here is anthropologist Robert Redfield. He wrote a book
about Tepotzlan, a village in Mexico. Not too much later,
anthropologist Oscar Lewis wrote a book about the very same
village, one of the rare cases of a restudy. Redfield said about
the differences in the books he and Oscar Lewis wrote:
I think we must recognize that the personal interests and
values of the investigator influence the content of the
description of the community....The hidden question behind
my book is, `What did these people enjoy?' The hidden
question behind Dr. Lewis' book is, `What do these people
suffer from?' (1955, p. 136)
These are not chance questions. It is not a fluke, a quirk, that
Robert Redfield and Oscar Lewis asked the particular questions
they did: they were very, very different people.
My last quotation is from a New Yorker profile on Supreme
Court Justice Brennan, now retired. Brennan and his Supreme
Court colleagues make legal decisions based on research, of
course, but the research that they do is tempered by their
subjectivity:
In a 1986 Times interview, Brennan was asked by Jeffrey
Leads, his former clerk, to describe the hardest decision he
had to make as a Justice. `The school-prayer cases.... The
position I finally took took a long time to come around to.
In the face of my whole lifelong experience as a Roman
Catholic, to say that prayer was not an appropriate thing in
public schools, that gave me a hard time. I struggled.'
(1970, p. 62) The context of my experience with subjectivity
requires an overview of the research I've been doing. I will
discuss subjectivity, generally, and then introduce the places
that I have been, along with the process of experiencing
subjectivity. My awareness of subjectivity undoubtedly has
developed from my research. For twenty years my research has
been directed to the school community relationship, to exploring
what schools are like given who sends their children to them.
That, basically, is the foundation for all the research that I
do. It focuses on local control, and the fact that people who
send their children to school feel they've got a right to
contribute to the shaping of that school. This fact more or less
applies to nonpublic and public schools. The setting for my
studies has been high schools. What I look at in these high
schools is almost everything that goes on in them. As soon as I
have the rapport to do so, I will try to attend all the school's
classes, meetings, and activities in order to be as full a
participant in the life of the school as I can manage. In
addition to the high school, I go to the host community, which
has been a town, in one case, a church, in another and a subgroup
of parents in the case of nonpublic schools. What interests me
about the host community is its history, demography, and its
current political, economic, and religious conditions. I collect
data by means of observation, documents, and multisession
interviews. This, then, is the focus of my research and the
context within which I've come to understand the unfolding
process of my subjectivity.
One does not know that something is a process until it has
played itself out to some point. Then you can look back and say,
"Ah ha, there's a process." I explicate this process because I
assume that we do not appropriately grasp the place of
subjectivity in our own research until we consciously experience
our research at work. I am subjective when I do my
research. I never think of this acknowledgement as making a
confession. I'm subjective when I do research--as are we
all--because of the affective state of my being: that is, I have
values, attitudes, and tastes. If you can show me somebody who
has no values, attitudes or tastes, then I will believe that
there is someone who is not subjective when they do research.
I'm subjective because of my history, that is because I have had
a past, in a particular place and time, within a particular
family, and so forth. I am subjective because of my
biography--male, husband, father, 60-years-old, Jewish, Democrat,
life member of the Sierra Club, member of the ACLU, professor.
My biography shapes me, presses me, influences me in certain
directions, as does everyone's.
To be subjective, therefore, is not a minor matter. It is
to be disposed, inclined, if not compelled. It is to avoid,
dislike, if not abhor. It is to seek out, support, if not
advocate. I am subjective, notwithstanding that, Tom Barone
(1990), wrote that both objectivity and its dyadic counterpart,
subjectivity, are dead. I'm not sure that either member of the
dyad is dead. Moreover, not believing that we're in the age of
post- subjectivity, nor that we ever will be, I hold that my
affective state, my history, my biography, invariably will create
the dynamic composite I call subjectivity. "Dynamic" is an
important qualifier because my subjectivity will change over
time, as things change both inside and outside me. What is
further true about my subjectivity is that under no circumstance
can I shed it. I can deal with it, I can manage it, I can
grapple with it, I can understand it, but I cannot shed it like
so much dried skin after being sunburned. Thus, it is ever
present to shape my behavior wherever I go, whatever I do, no
less in my role as researcher that in any other role in life that
I play. In research, however, where objectivity has been the
directing standard more that in any other behavioral domain, I
may feel pressed to seek out my subjectivity, because
historically it has been the bad guy, the culprit, the abused and
despised member of a Siamese pair. In fact, and to the contrary,
subjectivity has been appreciated in domains other than research
and objectivity even denigrated, as regards interpersonal
relationships, for example. Also as regards the work of the
painter, the musician, the poet, the photographer, and the
novelist, but not the research. Some final thoughts before I
discuss my process of experiencing and understanding
subjectivity. I want to know about my subjectivity as a research
because of its capacity to dictate the choices I make in all
phases of my research, with results that can range, which I will
soon illustrate, from the virtuous to the vicious. When I
began my research many years ago, I believed that there was no
such thing a value-free inquiry. I did not, however, accept
subjectivity as a good thing. I thought of subjectivity as bias
and associated objectivity with fairness and goodness. Mostly,
to be quite accurate, my conception of both concepts was inert--a
little lump of low-level understanding. I thought I knew all
that I needed to know about each term. I didn't realize the
limitations of my understanding until what I knew became more
personal and thus more fully clothed with meaning.
The first stop on my research landscape is Mansfield and
Mansfield High School. Mansfield is a village in the midwest, a
very small rural area. Such little villages are islands created
by enormous expanses of corn and soybean fields. The fields go
right up to the boundaries of the city. Mansfield is twenty-five
miles to the nearest town; I realized after I had been there for
a while that nobody ever came to Mansfield by mistake. It was
not on the way to anywhere. Farmers had controlled the school
board forever. A condition for being elected was that you were a
native or had been around for a very long time.
The orienting idea of the study was to inquire into what
reality the rural school was oriented. In my simple minded
way--I'm not from a small town, I'm from Chicago--I wondered if
the high school was oriented toward the local community, in which
case the school would be a factor in the maintenance of that
community. Or was it oriented to the opportunity for jobs
outside in the larger society, in which case the school would be
focusing on individual student well-being and not the community.
What did I learn? I learned about a place where a sense of
community prevailed. I never thought much about what a sense of
community meant before going to Mansfield. The experience of
such places is special. It's the kind of experience that makes
me want to find more such places; it makes me feel like I want to
sustain those places that, in a manner of speaking, wrap their
arms around you. They're warm, nurturing, comforting, and secure
places. That is what I learned about in Mansfield. I would say
to the people I interviewed, "Look, I'm a city guy. I don't know
anything about places like Mansfield. Tell me what it's like to
grow up here? What's it like to be a student here? A mom here?
A grandparent here?" They would often think that they didn't
know anything to tell me; I'd say, "you don't have to know
anything special; just tell me about your life in this town."
And they did.
What I also learned from Mansfield was that the school was
an agent of this community. I had never thought about this
before either. If you have grown up in a small town, perhaps you
know all about this. The school was shaped by community life.
People felt that the school was theirs in the most profoundly
possessive way. The school board and educators insured that the
school would be a fitting agent of the community. For the first
time, I used the word "fit" in regard to schools. Before coming
to Mansfield I thought that schools were about doing good for me
and about serving the nation. I didn't know about a school being
shaped to be a fitting place for kids from a particular locale so
that that locale would be sustained by what happened to the
children in school. I had uncovered not only the nature of
community in Mansfield, but also the communal function of the
high school, which understanding I put in my book's subtitle,
"Schooling and the Survival of Community."
Here's what I realized--after the fact--about my
subjectivity in Mansfield. First, as regards the focus of the
book that came out of the study, I discovered my attachment to
community. It derived from my own community life in a
homogeneous, stable neighborhood in Chicago. It also derived
from successive summers spent in this same little resort village
in southern Michigan. The people in Mansfield had no idea that I
knew anything about community, because they believed that only if
you grew up in a place like Mansfield would you know about
community.
The second manifestation of my subjectivity had to do with
my research method. I discovered my attachment to the
ethnographic method. I learned that it pleased me to do
ethnographic fieldwork; I did it well, I thought. I got
satisfaction from the experiences that it provided me. What I
eventually decided was that I had a methodological commitment
that went in search of something to study. And I realized that I
was probably never in my whole life ever going to study anything
that didn't fit being done ethnographically. What this says to
me is that notwithstanding the fact that you maybe just as
skilled doing nonquantitative research as quantitative research,
there is something about a particular way of doing research that
suits you, is good for you, that you feel you like to do. I know
there are people who would never do quantitative research because
they feel completely inept to do so. That is a different issue,
and one that I understand. What I mean to be saying is that the
research methods we use are associated with our subjectivity.
The third manifestation has to do with the findings of my
research. As I have said before, I discovered my attachment to
the survival of a particular community and, by extension, to
other places like it. I like Mansfield, I thought it was
special, and I rooted for its perpetuation when state policy
makers deliberated on the fate of small schools. I was not
standing outside saying, "Hmm, now let's see, what about this and
what about that?" I liked the sense of community that prevailed
there, and thought that such places were uncommon. When I wrote
my book about Mansfield, I was saying in effect to readers,
hopefully to people who make policy, "Spare this place. There is
something worth saving about Mansfield." Can there be any doubt
that my subjectivity was at work when I said that?
Upon completion of my study of Mansfield and Mansfield High
School, I wrote my first paper, on subjectivity. It is called
"The Researcher and Subjectivity: Reflections on an Ethnography
of School and Community" (1982) . Here is what I realized.
Subjectivity operates throughout the entire research process,
from its beginning with the choice of what we study, including
our methods for data collecting and our analysis of data, and
ending with the conclusions we draw. To be sure, there is not a
one-to-one relationship between my affective state, my biography,
and my history and my choice of topic, the conclusions I reach,
and so forth. But the relationship is far from random. I can't
predict what you'll study if I know you well, but I can
understand why you study what you study if I do know you well.
With this understanding, I can know what is much worth knowing:
what kind of stake you have in your research topic, if not in
reaching particular outcomes.
Your stake tells me what you care about and how much you
care. Caring, I maintain, is the normal behavior of normal
people when they conduct research. I recently saw this caring
and stake come out in the work of a doctoral student. She had
been interviewing all semester long. One day toward the end of
the semester she said, "I realize that I"ve had a hidden agenda
all the time." She was conducting her research with, so to
speak, sides chosen, a position that she wished would be
supported. She was a researcher in early childhood education and
very keen on outdoor education as a component of early childhood
education. She was interviewing many teachers in the community
who were full-time teachers of such children. She wanted not
only to know where outdoor play fit in their curriculum; she
wanted also to find that they organized outdoor play, and was
negative when they didn't. She had no idea that she had a cause,
and that this cause was shaping her research process.
My next school-community study following Mansfield and
Mansfield High School was in Bethany Baptist Church, whose pastor
was appalled by what he saw happening to his children in the
public schools, took them out, and established a K-12 religious
school, Bethany Baptist Academy. The school was adjacent to the
church, which is the host- community for Bethany Baptist Academy.
Their view of the Bible is as the literal work of God. They are
self-proclaimed fundamentalists, and dedicated in every way that
I can imagine. I approached this study with the understandings
of subjectivity that I've just laid out. I thought I knew
something about subjectivity, and I did. I could give a talk on
it, I could write a paper on it, I could even sound as if I knew
what I was talking about-- a very dangerous state of mind for
learning any thing more about a topic. My research purpose
was to explore the relationship between scripture and the life of
the school it engendered. My orienting idea was Goffman's (1961)
total institution, which said something about my subjectivity,
though I didn't fully realize what it said when I began.
Goffman's idea of total institutions was based on research that
was done in jails, institutions for the insane and concentration
camps. At Bethany I learned about truth with a capital T. I
learned about the logical imperatives of such a conception of
truth as it applies not only to the shaping of a school, but also
to me. For fundamentalist Christians are proselytizing
truth-holders, and, naturally, I became a target for their
proselytizing. In fact, they had no choice but to try and
convert me; this was not an intended part of my research plan.
I daily watched an institution inculcate its ideology in order
to create dedicated believers who would in turn disseminate the
word of God to the nonbelievers who had not accepted Jesus Christ
as their personal savior. Finally, with regard to what I had
learned, I marvelled at the incredible single-mindedness of a
school so possessed of doctrinal certainty that it could dismiss
the utility of all other religious expressions, as well as ignore
the principle of pluralism that was the legal basis for their
existence. A paradox, I thought, and still do, a case of biting
the hand that feeds you. Schools like Bethany Baptist Academy
are absolutely legal, following a Supreme Court pronouncement of
the 1920s. The school I studied for eighteen months did not give
a moment's time to the ideal of pluralism. It did not
acknowledge that its very existence depended on pluralism.
My subjectivity awareness was all ex post facto again, as it
had been in Mansfield. I knew, of course, when I was pleased and
when I was annoyed, when I was angry and when I was upset. I
didn't pay special attention to my subjective feelings. I
couldn't escape them, but I didn't note them. Then, when I was
writing chapter one of the Christian school book, I had an
unforgettable experience. I saw creeping into my language some
very negative feelings about Bethany and Bethany Baptist Academy.
When I was writing about Mansfield, I wanted to celebrate
community. There was no less of a sense of community in Bethany.
What was going on in Bethany was not less nurturing, less warm,
less caring, less embracing, less important to the members of its
community then what was going on in Mansfield, but I saw that I
was not celebrating it. What was happening to me? I had
stumbled over my subjectivity at work in the course of my
writing. This was the first conscious experience I had had of
bumping into my subjectivity, of being jolted by it in one of the
phases of research, the last phase, the write-up. Obviously, my
ox had been gored. As a non-Christian at Bethany I experienced
repeated proselytizing by students, parents, teachers, and the
superintendent of the school. I felt that I had been assaulted
by the most arrogant people I had ever met in my entire life. I
had never before met anyone who worried about my salvation and
thought I would never be safe until I became a born-again
Christian. Obviously, all of this had gotten to me in more
ways that I understood; it was coming out in my writing, though I
didn't want it to. I did not want chapter one, let alone chapter
two, three, four, five or six, to be redolent of the anger
suggested by terms such as "assault" and "arrogance." To avoid
this, I had to be very conscious of my subjectivity. I hadn't
been aware of it along the way, but I certainly was at the end.
Given the opportunity to repent in leisure, I now looked back
at Mansfield and, retrospectively, became further aware of the
operation of my subjectivity there. I had passed lightly over
Mansfield High School's educational shortcomings, and Mansfield's
anti-black sentiments. By calling their racism "anti-black
sentiments," I euphemized the racism that was rampant in this
little town. I did this because, as I have said, I thought
there was something very special in Mansfield.
This is not necessarily what a black researcher would have
concluded about Mansfield, or, for that matter, any other
researcher. There are many stories that can be told about the
very same classroom, teacher, school, or community. I told my
story about Mansfield and Mansfield High School. I had found a
verifiable perspective-- verifiable in the sense that others
could see it, too. This perspective was the result of seeing by
means of my personal dispositions, that is, by my subjectivity.
I saw these personal dispositions as the basis for the
distinctive story I could tell. I saw the inevitable filtering
and focusing effect of my subjectivity and I called it my
"virtuous subjectivity" (1988), virtuous because it enabled me to
reach the outcomes I did. In short, my subjectivity is the
basis for the singular contribution I can make based on whatever
I study. It shows me what I can see in a way that impels me to
make something of it. The benefits is seeing. The price I pay
for what I do see is what, accordingly, I do not see, because a
way of seeing is always also a way of not seeing. I must at
once couple virtuous subjectivity with vicious subjectivity, in
order to clarify an important negative possibility. I realized
after my ox-goring experience at Bethany Baptist Academy, in my
stumbling over my subjectivity while writing chapter one, that
the risk I ran in celebrating community in Mansfield and
Mansfield High School, was that I had asked the Redfield
question, "What is there that people enjoy in Mansfield?" and not
the Lewis question, "What do people suffer from in Mansfield?"
Moreover, I was bringing to the Bethany write-up, an implicit
interest in the Lewis question, though I was not sure it was the
Lewis question that I wanted as the operating one.
Directed by the Redfield question in Mansfield, I could
easily have stacked the deck in my story so that the reader would
never learn about the Mansfield residents who lived beyond the
embrace of Mansfield's warm sense of community, and there were
such residents, I realized, therefore, the need--wherever I go as
researcher--to explore my null research behavior: Who am I not
seeing? Where am I not going? What questions am I not asking?
What am I hearing but not appreciating? I further realize the
importance of looking for paradox so that I don't let my stake in
my research blind me to the contradictions which characterize
institutional and individual conduct. Looking for paradox helps
to expand the possibly narrowing impact of my subjectivity.
My third study was at Riverview and Riverview High School. Based
on my just described self-discovery while writing chapter one, I
wrote a paper called "Virtuous Subjectivity: In the
Participant-Observer's I's (1988)." In its last paragraph, I
made myself a promise: the next time I conducted a study, I
would keep track of my subjectivity throughout the whole study.
I was never going to go into the field again and learn about it
afterward.
The site of the Riverview study was a medium-size,
blue-collar city in California, with a stable multiethnic
population. My research purpose was to explore the impact of
ethnic-based diversity on the shaping of a school. My orienting
question was, "Whose perspectives are reflected in the school,
where no ethnic group is the majority, and the values of white,
black, Mexican, and Filipino subgroups, not only can be
divergent, but also in conflict. In short, I was inquiring into
where the mandate came from for what the teachers did in school.
In Riverview I learned about a school whose students enjoyed
great social opportunities of their own making. Ethnic
distinctions were not barriers to social interactions. I learned
also that Riverview High School had created many alternative
academic programs for students who could not succeed in the
mainstream curriculum. These programs both saved students from
defeat and isolated them. They also made the mainstream
curriculum safe from the school's "deviant" students. I learned
about education by isolation. The curriculum and teacher
conduct, though affected by student ethnicity, was influenced
primarily by universalistic ideas drawn from the notion of making
it in the dominant society. Finally, I learned about sincere
teachers who tried hard to help poor minority students succeed.
Teachers failed because they did not know how to do better. When
they tried to do better, and they did try, all the time, they
ended up doing more of the same.
I watched and felt and noted the results of my
self-monitored subjectivity, and the results took the form of
what I called "my subjective I's" (1988). I came across six
subjective I's in the course of my fieldwork in Riverview.
The first one I called "the ethnic-maintenance I." I saw people
doing what I valued myself--working to maintain their own ethnic
identity. The second I called "the community maintenance I." I
saw people in Riverview, as I had in Mansfield, doing things to
keep the community together, to sustain a sense of community, to
keep its history fresh in the minds of people. In short, they
didn't want the outsiders coming in to undermine the sense of
community that old-timers knew so well and liked so much.
The third subjective I I called my "E-Pluribis-Unum I." It
refers to the absence of ethnic distinctions as barriers to
social interaction: there was nothing that would go on between
youngsters from within an ethnic group that wouldn't also go on
with youngsters from across all ethnic groups. It was like
stumbling upon utopia. The students called this social fact
mingling. I was much taken by the mingling that I saw in
Riverview. It obviously resonated with something very important
in me.
The fourth subjective I I called, "The Justice-Seeking I."
This had to do with the fact that in its county Riverview was the
poorest town. It was stigmatized by all of its neighbors. There
was nobody I met over the age of eleven who couldn't tell me a
story about something negative that had happened to them outside
the town. The people of Riverview are given a hard time, and
this made me angry. Because I thought Riverview people were good
people, I didn't think they deserved to be stigmatized. The
next subjective I I called, "The Pedagogical-Meliorist Eye."
What this means is that I sat in classrooms and I watched such
terrible teaching that I thought that I might want to choke the
teachers. Choking is not good procedure on the part of the
fieldworker. I had been in schools where the teaching hadn't
been wonderful, but I had never been where the students were so
poor. For them the school was a major place of promise. When I
saw that the promise wasn't happening in their school, I felt
moved to action in a way I had never felt moved before. I had
come upon my subjectivity again. The last subjective I I
called my "Non-Research Human I," drawing upon a distinction that
anthropologist Morris Frielich makes between the research self
and the human self while doing research. What this had to do
with was the very warm reception that my wife and I got during
the fieldwork year, not just inside the school, where I very
much depend upon it, but outside the school as well. We were
made to feel welcome. Clearly, the more you have that kind of
experience, the more you soften the harsher edges of your
experiences. The more I cared, the more I wondered how that
caring affected my research. I noted it, of course.
With the record of these six points I could now see my
subjectivity unfolding before me as explicit, accumulating facets
of myself. Each facet is a point on a personal map. The map
overall contains other facets that were not elicited by the
particular circumstances that I experienced at Riverview and
Riverview High School. Which is to say that my subjectivity
composite contains more than six facets, and that when I am in
some other research situation, other facets of my composite are
likely to be elicited. The six subjective I's evoked in
Riverview are a case of what I called "situational subjectivity."
What did I gain by this awareness of my subjectivity?
Knowing where self and subject connected, I became mindful of
when and where I felt positively and negatively, which meant that
I could possibly contain my subjectivity, get it in shape, so
that I don't become the victim of its negative effects, but,
rather, can use it in its virtuous aspects. The site of my
current research is two high schools in New Mexico. The purpose
of the research is to explore the nature of schooling in relation
to the bicultural nature of the students' home and community.
The orienting concept is "dual world identity," and the orienting
question is, "Do students develop some form of biculturalism so
that they are able to manage a loyalty to home and a community
culture, at the same time that they become competent participants
in the majority culture? To date, I have identified three
subjective I's in my prep school site. The first one is the
"Bedazzled, Envious I." What this means is that the school is so
well-to-do, the buildings are so wonderful, the library so
fantastic, everything is so elegant that I'm bedazzled. It is a
stunning physical place. I'm envious because I would like every
child in America to attend such a school. My "Public-School I"
is a sort of indignant one. This I believes that children ought
to attend public schools. The prep school is a private school.
I think that public schools are important for the well-being of
democracy and here I am studying this fantastic private school.
The part of me that is a public school person is annoyed by
the other part of me for liking it so much. This refers to my
third subjective I, what I called my "Favoring I." I recently
realized something for the first time in all the years that I've
been doing research of this sort. I have never seen a school
that I thought that I would have liked my children to have
attended. Worse than this, I would have liked to have gone
myself.
My other research site is at an Indian school, a nonpublic
school devoted exclusively to the education of Indian children.
I will discuss only one of the several aspects of my ethnicity
this cultural setting has elicited. "My Empathetic I" emerged
before I even began the year of fieldwork. It came out when I
was watching the movie, Dances with Wolves. By at the end of the
movie, it is clear that the good Indians, not the Pawnee, are
going to be caught by the awful soldiers. I had already begun to
identify sufficiently with the Indian school to be distressed by
the ending of this movie. You don't have to know much history to
know what the end would be like. The remaining subjective I's
are: the Holocaust I, the Perverse I, the Coopter-Censored I,
the Disillusioned I, the Pedagogical-Melorist I (which is a
repeat from Riverview. Subjective I's from another study can pop
up again; these are not exclusive matters); the Caring I, the
Immersed I, the White-Man I, and the Self-Restrained I. When I
take a note of a particular subjective I, I feel I've put it in
its place; it is less likely to get out of hand. It may be
accompanied by countervailing sentiments and dispositions. For
example, there is the "Romantic-Empathetic I," on the one hand,
and the "Coopted-White Man I," on the other.
Given my experience with subjectivity, what do I believe
about it? It is always with us, this personal composite of
dispositional and deterministic orientations. Depending on where
we are and what is happening, different aspects of our
subjectivity will be elicited. This is the situational
subjectivity I mentioned before. Rather than denigrate
subjectivity, its traditional fate, I believe it is more
appropriate to cherish it. This is my virtuous subjectivity. It
is the basis for mobilizing my attention, my energy, my concern,
and my imagination. Anything that does all that must be
virtuous! Since our subjectivity has the capacity to shape what
we see, it also can shape what we don't see. Therefore, it is
essential to note the emergence of our subjectivity so we can
tame it, so to speak.
I conclude with a puzzle of sorts. As noted above, Robert
Redfield, in his study of a Mexican village, asked, "What do the
people enjoy?" Oscar Lewis, studying the same village, asked,
"What do these people suffer from?" The resulting books were
strikingly different. Is it not likely that their books might
have been strikingly different even if they had asked identical
questions?
References
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