Of indicators and experiences
Of indicators and experiences
As I sit with the topic of abstraction, I thought I'd reflect on it a bit more, now moving from the space of how we define our work internally to the space of 'evidence' on the difference we make. This is obviously a multi-faceted aspect, evidence. Yet I want to highlight one particular aspect of it connected to abstraction.
I recently read an article about indicators and how they have become the central tenet to evidence (Merry 2011). The article described the history of indicators and how they got to become as prominent as they are now. The main point Merry makes is that indicators are simplified numerical representations of complex phenomena that somehow imply objectivity. She contends that the political debate around observed changes is shifted to a technical definition of indicators that make progress auditable, seemingly objectively assessable, and comparable. Indicators are independent of context, i.e., can be used to compare different contexts and aggregated across contexts. The consequence, Merry finds, is that the deployment of such statistical measures replaces political debate with technical expertise. Merry makes the important point that "indicators typically conceal their political and theoretical origins and underlying theories of social change and activism. They rely on practices of measurement and counting that are themselves opaque" (p.84).
So while indicators are seemingly neutral and objective, well, they aren't. They are an abstraction from the complexity of context and are concealing a lot of assumptions on what is relevant (for the people who defined the indicators). This does not mean that they are not potentially useful, just that we have to keep those caveats in mind.
Also, this talks to what I called in an earlier email the need to 're-entangle' the (abstract) evidence with the reality of the context. Can we bring what indicators tell us and connect it back to the context in which we (or somebody) has measured these indicators? This will shift our interpretation of the data we see. Experiencing the lived reality of young people in a city in Tanzania might make it clear why we don't see such a big shift in the wellbeing indicators we are using, for example.
Philip Shepherd, the embodiment teacher I have been following and have trained with for a while now, quotes in his book New Self New World the psychotherapist R. D. Laing (Shepherd 2010, 73, emphasis in the original):
Any experience of reality is indescribable. Just look around you for a moment and see, hear, smell and feel where you are.... Your consciousness can partake of all that is in one single moment, but you will never be able to describe the experience.
Shepherd continues:
Experience cannot be described not by words nor even by the formulas and statistics of science. A duplicate, however elaborately constructed, can never be complete. It will never have life. It will never come into relationship with the unbroken whole or answer to all that is. Yet our head-centered existence obsesses over its duplicates in its effort to represent the living world accurately and predictably - largely so that it will be able to guide us in how to react and what to anticipate. In the meantime, our obsession with duplicates resolutely distances our attention from the sensational and complementary pole of our consciousness: the mindful center of Being in the pelvis.
A duplicate, to use Shepherd's word, can be thought of for example in the form of a database of evidence filled with statistics that seem to describe the world and changes that happen. Shepherd explains our being drawn to indicators with the head-centredness that pervades our culture. The head prefers the abstract, the duplicate.
What this tells me is, similar to my conclusion from last week, that we need to find a way to balance the abstract with the concrete, and the usefulness of indicators as evidence for the head with the ability of a much richer experience of a situation through the body, which should be seen as a different, though not less valuable, type of evidence.
References
Merry, Sally Engle. 2011. “Measuring the World: Indicators, Human Rights, and Global Governance: With CA Comment by John M. Conley.” Current Anthropology 52 (S3): S83–95. https://doi.org/10.1086/657241.
Shepherd, Philip. 2010. New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley, Calif: North Atlantic Books.
The Paper Museum
I finished reading Bewilderment by Richard Powers. I can wholeheartedly recommend the book, but it is certainly not easily digestible. Here a last quote from the book, connecting to the one from last week.
He [Robby] smiles and shakes his head, but not in disagreement. He knows now that no grown-up gets it. He holds out his hands to the grass and sky and oaks and lindens lining the lake. Paws up in the crisp air, he waves them to include our distant invisible neighborhood, the university, the houses of friends, the Capitol, and states beyond our state. Everybody's inside everyone.
Not much to add here.
Photo
Photo by Héctor J. Rivas on Unsplash