Transformative Anthropology

Previous blog posts on Transformative Anthropology and Strategic Serendipity stack up here.

note a.

This page captures notes for my research project on the role of happenstance in individual human development. Although these notes achieve a linear order here, presented as they are in the order they come to me, this is not the same order each will achieve in a future, formalized, presentation as paper and video presentation.

I. Transformative Anthropology – example & brief definition

At times individuals experience events which change their lives. Such events broadly fall into one of two kinds: certain, or, chance. For the former kind of event, it is instantiated as a matter of certainty. For the latter kind of event, it is instantiated as a matter of chance.

Transformative Anthropology’s central concern is the nature and implications of chance events that change people’s lives. Such an event is the fundamental structural element of Transformative Anthropology.

The following example was offered in response to a question posed to participants in a workshop in 2006.

“I met the man who became my husband totally by chance. I was dining with three girlfriends. Seated at the table next to us was a couple and a man. My seat faced away from their table, but its back faced the back of the man’s seat. I heard a ping, and turned toward the sound to see that a dessert fork had fallen to the floor next to my seat. I picked it up, knowing it came from the table behind me.

The man turned toward me. Our eyes met. He smiled. I handed him the fork. He made some small talk about his delicious dessert.

“I bet it’s good.” I said. With that he asked me if I’d like a bite.

When his party broke up so his friends could go to a movie, I asked him if he’d like to join us. He did and he turned up the charm. At the end of the evening, he gently grabbed my elbow and whispered that he’d like to call me.

We dated for six months, became engaged, and married a year later.”

I asked her:

“Was the restaurant you and your friends regular hang out?”

She answered:

“If you want to know whether it was inevitable that we ended up there, it wasn’t because we rotated picking a restaurant for our girl’s nights, and my friend who picked the restaurant on this night, was the one who always wanted to try a new place. It was the first time I had ever been in this restaurant.”

Later, this example will be used to further explore the concept of a chance strategic contingency.

II. Question of Terminology

In my not stop quest to research one of the most common factors in a person’s life-cycle development, serendipity, I initiated the project by coining the term Transformative Anthropology. It’s intended to arch over the project. I’m sticking with it too, but it misses the mark as a coinage. Still, it hits the mark in the personal sense because my modest discovery was the result of debriefing and analyzing informal ethnographic documentation. And, it was yours truly who had his attitude transformed a bit.

But, I am bugged over a separate issue of terminology. When I wander around the various ways people refer to life-altering serendipity, I’m not satisfied with the various common terms; such as: serendipity, happenstance, luck, dumb luck. lucky break, blessing. There are two reasons. First, each has slightly different connotations without any single term having a wholly satisfying connotation. Second, the term that would fit the bill would be precise to the point of its partly explaining the novel conception I’m galvanized by.

The context for my dissatisfaction is important to this quandary. Incredibly, conceptions of “life altering serendipity” have not been—as far as I know—deeply defined, let alone researched, in any field. This is especially surprising with respect to developmental and personality psychology. This is also true for anthropology.

As for philosophy, the situation is different because while, for example, contingency is problematicized, at the same time, this focal point does not refer to everyday happenstance facets of human development. It is the same for treatments of related subject matter, such as constitutive luck.

Shortly after I began looking for brilliant ideation about the common enough fact of life, its randomness with respect to human development, I came across the work of Nicholas Rescher. He’s a very well known philosopher in scholarly philosophy, even was once President of the American Philosophical Association. He published an article, “Luck and the Enigmas of Fate,” in the journal Philosophical Exchange, in 1993. Although I haven’t been able to obtain a copy of the article, I found it listed in his bibliography under the heading, Philosophical Anthropology. I thought then I was about to learn just how unoriginal my insight was.

Then in 1995, his book, Luck: The Brilliant Randomness Of Everyday Life was published. I noted this at thought, ‘There you go. This has been sorted out.’ (Incidentally, Rescher is one of the most important philosophers alive—as it turns out.) I read it eagerly. Rescher, in this book for the lay person, employs classic pragmatism, phenomenology, and, epistemic logic, to sort out through and then delineate the nature of luck, and its crucial subsets, good fortune and bad fortune.

Incredibly, the aspect that has my full attention, serendipity in human development (etc.!) is basically passed over in his book, due to its being taken for granted as an essential ingredient of human life. In touching this subject lightly and in this way, Rescher—for me—points toward one of the intriguing elements of how this is problematicized in my own phenomenological research: serendipity, being pervasive, is also taken as a given.

But, I don’t like the prosaic terms. Anyway, I’ve sketched out the context for my own search about conceptions of everyday serendipity in various fields.

Then, I came across a paper, Three Principles of Serendip: Insight, Chance, and Discovery in Qualitative Research (Gary Fine & James Deegan,) and at found a web site at Bryn Mawr College, called Serendip. Once again, I assumed the originalityof my own thinking was to be deposed. This would be fine too. I’m really looking to take a dip in well-travelled waters. …when I find the body of water.

It wasn’t to be at Serendip. Although, it is a fascinating web site about accidental discovery.

This noted, the paper by Fine and Deegan evoked the solution to the problem of terminology.

For Merton (1968, p.157) three features characterize datum that fit into a serendipity pattern: it must be “unanticpated,” “anomalous,” and “strategic” (i.e. with implications for the development of theory.)

I rolled the three terms around in my mind.

Unanticipated, yes!

Anomalous. no!

Strategic. yes—for ‘strategic’ describes the ramification of the serendipitous event with respect to human development.

Unanticipated, strategic, events> are equivalent to serendipity, given the direction of my conceptual aims. I felt the problem of terminology was almost resolved. What Fine and Deegan helped me to see was the notion of ‘the strategic.’

As for ‘unanticipated,’ this would be covered in employing the word, chance. Contingency would be substituted for ‘event.’

Giving the following informal equivalences, and, giving the resolution.

Serendipity, (in the context of life-changing events)

= unanticipated, strategic, event

= chance, strategic, contingency.

(or, foreshortened to the acronym CSC)

Although the alternate string-cum-terms, accidental (or random) strategic event, carry close to the same sense as CSC, in a follow-on note, the important senses conveyed by chance, and, contingency, will be explicated.

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note b.

After a little “mind wringing” I’ve decided to refashion the coinage, Chance Strategic Contingency, into:

STRATEGIC SERENDIPITY.

My thinking about terminology, having passed through the former term, has come, next, through the keep it simple stupid phase, and arrived at Strategic Serendipity.

Strategic Serendipity: in the context of individual human development, a chance event that comes to completely alter the course of a person’s development. Among the many kinds of change such an event impacts, the common kinds result in changes in: key relationships; career; location; interests.