Making the Familiar Strange

I thought I’d take some time out to talk a little more about anthropology, but not from a definitional or historical place, but more from a storytelling base. What are the stories anthropology tells, what does it say it tells, and how does it work here, on this blog and website?

Well, first of all, anthropology’s basics can be broken down to something simple: the study of humans. Typically, anthropology uses what’s called “qualitative research”- or research that’s not as based on numbers. As opposed to doing huge surveys where we break down the information into statistics, anthropology tends to favour more story-based approaches. As an anthropologist, I talk to people individually and get their stories and approaches, and then analyse that. As opposed to looking at huge large scale areas, like all of the United Kingdom for example, anthropology typically looks at very small scale communities, like one specific church that exists in one place in the UK. Now, I say typically because things can be massively different. Kate Fox, for example, did a study of English culture using anthropology and anthropological methods, which is large scale. Anthropologists can also use surveys and get larger conceptions of demographics, using the smaller scale community conversations to simply bolster and give greater information to the statistics present. But these are ways things happen, I want to focus more on the all important why.

Anthropology is all about making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar is a famous phrase anthropologists and sociologists use when approaching research and understanding our role in the whole process. What it means is simple: the point is to complicate the things we take for granted, and question them the way an outside would; we take the things typically considered the ‘Other’ and make them more relatable, and more similar to what it is that we recognise. Essentially, we like to shorten the distances between peoples, and push ourselves to break down the boundaries people use to distinguish between the ‘us’ and the ‘them’.

I think the idea of the familiar strange and the strange familiar helps to explain why qualitative research is so important to anthropological research. In order to make the ‘other’ more familiar to us, we need to hear their stories directly. The point of an anthropologist is to tell stories as they were told to us, like an early ethnographic folklorist who copies stories as told by village grandmothers. I seek the village grandmothers - or anyone really who will tell me their stories and let me think them over in my mind. Likewise, it sometimes takes deep chat with someone to really get to know them, and this can make the people we feel most familiar with feel like new people.

There was a period of time I was investigating doing an anthropological study of my own mother. I learned more about her while interviewing her than I did spending over twenty years with her as my mother. This isn’t because we never had lengthy conversations before, but because the nature of the conversation is different. This is because anthropologists are just annoying. Anthropology, at it’s heart, is a collection of questions about simple things in life: why we wear what we wear when we wear it; what we say when we say it and how we say it. We prod questions immensely with little apparent end in sight - always anchoring everything to something we can see or hear from the community or individual themselves. We sit and list endless questions about every aspect of everything - we try to revert back to a type of infancy, to point at anything basic and ask ‘what’ and ‘why’ until who we are speaking to are simply sick of us. And then we ask someone else.

For many anthropologists, they see their field sites as remote locations. They load a backpack up with essentials, a voice recorder, maybe a camera and a journal. They grab a machete and trek into the wilderness, eager to live in small villages they hope the world has never heard from before.

I, on the other hand, find my field sites in the familiar world around us. I seek out the stuff we run into every day without thinking about it. The stuff we watch or play or buy without really thinking too much about it. Popular culture are the familiar things around us that I seek to make unfamiliar. I do not trek with a machete, but with a laptop, Xbox and a high-speed internet connection. There is something interesting about people, fundamentally, and this does not change with the use of high-speed internet and online chat rooms. Some unknown community is not the only one who still tells interesting stories - we all do.

In other words, anthropology is not just about finding unfamiliar locations and people and talking about them, but the first part of the phrase - making the familiar strange - is just as important as the second part - making the strange familiar.

So I hope you enjoy this process, the process of taking everything familiar to us and making it strange and new and wonderful.