Social Constructions and Samoa; biological determinism and genes

Here's a documentary about the Margaret Mead/Derek Freeman controversy, made in 1988:

Margaret Mead and Samoa, 1988

Here's a second documentary, made by the BBC in 2007, about the same issue:

Tales from the Jungle: Margaret Mead, 2007

I much preferred the first video. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I found the first video considered, poignant, and intelligent; and the second video dishonest, manipulative and superficial.

The first documentary follows Derek Freeman's arguments and logic in much more depth than the latter, and ends with him walking from the camera, proclaiming that science needs 'heretics', prepared to challenge conventions and orthodoxy, and that social science needs to develop a stronger sense of what people have in common. The latter video presents Derek Freeman as a vengeful, hateful, spiteful creature, obsessed with tarnishing the legacy of the greatest female social scientist anthropology has ever produced. (It then ends on a insincerely equivocatory note: suggesting that both perspectives - that produced by Mead in a matter of months, and that produced by Freeman after decades of research - should receive equal merit, and neither should be seen as adequately 'countering' the different ontological perspective offered by the other...)

However, I despised the latter video and admired the former video, not because I 'hate' the concept of 'social construction', and 'love' the concept of 'genetic determinism'. For instance, I also despise this Channel 4 documentary made in 2006 by geneticist Armand Leroi, which argues from a mirror vantagepoint: showing a general ignorance and arrogance about the importance of culture and historical contingency, and over-attribution of human society's success to its genetic differences from other animals.

I despise both the 2007 BBC documentary, and the 2006 Channel 4 documentary because they seem to think nothing wrong with reducing social theory, and debates about social theory, to an arid binary: nature or nurture.

It perhaps sounds trite and insincere to say that both nature and nurture - and more importantly the complex and unpredictable interactions between the two - should be recognised as vital for understanding social behaviours, but this my position. It should be accepted as a starting point for any investigation into social and societal processes, and without this acceptance both the more biologically and sociologically inclined social sciences will bitterly assert their own half-truths as complete realities. This understanding should have been accepted decades ago, and debates regarding such issues should not take up any more space than an endnote.

In fact, endnote 96, on pages 309-310 of Manuel De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History:

In the 1980s many of the original "discoveries" of cultural anthropologists were found to be oversimplifications or even distortions of the social realities they had studied. (The most famous debunkings were perhaps of Margaret Mead's claims that adolescents in Samoa did not go through similar anxieties as their Western counterparts and that males and females in Chambri exhibited an opposite pattern of dominance as in most other societies.) On all this, and the process through which cultural relativism became entrenched in academic circles, see Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991)
The "debunker", in the case of Mead's observations on Samoa, was the anthropologist Derek Freeman. However, this cannot be boiled down to a question of different interpretations of the data, each having an equal chance of being valid. As Brown puts it, "Mead's book was based on 9 months of fieldwork when she was 23 years old. Derek Freeman ... conducted 6 years of field work in Samoa" (ibid., p. 16) He then adds: "One can only ask how Mead could have been so wrong ... Mead went to Samoa without a knowledge of the language and with unfortunate games in her familiarity with the extensive literature on Samoa ... When she reached Samoa she did not undertake a general study of the Samoan ethos and culture but launched directly into her study of adolescence. Her informants were adolescent girls; neither boys nor adults were studied. (ibid., pp. 18-19).
The list of criticisms continues. One can only wonder how the modern left (or rather, that influential segment of it, the "social constructionists") can pretend to offer a coherent strategy of resistance based on such flimsy foundations. In any event, the fortress walls of cultural relativism will prove a poor defence against the new dangers posted by human sociobiologists. Indeed, the old stance may actually be counterproductive since it will make any revelation of its inadequacies (as in the case of the universality of color perception of facial expressions ) seem like a triumph for the opposition.

Exactly. There is nothing intrinsically 'left wing' or 'progressive' or appreciative of cultural and ethnic differences to assert a fully 'social constructivist' position about differences between peoples. In fact, as native Samoan Dr Fanaafi le Tagoloa suggests, 43 minutes into the 1988 documentary, the converse could be argued:

We're no different from you in Australia or the United States or any other part of the world. We all go through these phases and perhaps it's our cultures that makes the semblances of differences. But for Margaret Mead to make us behave as if we are non-humans... like animals in our promiscuity... I think that is a very great disfavour that she has done us.

Emergent Hiatus

Good morning.

I've almost posted three entries in the last few weeks.

1. According to a chapter in an economic history book I read obsessively for a week [1], many of the most important technological innovations during the (so-called) Industrial Revolution weren't large, clunking pieces of machinery like steam engines, but improvements to small, every-day devices like buckles and screws. This made me think about the psychology of salience some more: do people tend to think louder, bigger, more visible things are more likely to be the causes of actions than quieter, smaller, more discreet items? I remember an interview in New Scientist [2] where it was suggested this is what (nominally) successful managers do, but selectively: successful managers are those which manage to attribute good events to themselves, but bad events to everything else! When people see 'leaders', to what extent are they actually just seeing 'selectively salient opportunists'?
2. According to another chapter in the same volume, China had a pivotal role in the growth of the British Empire's international trade network from (say) the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. | The Chinese government wanted to stabilise their domestic economy, and had decided to do this by moving to a 'Silver standard': any item of value a traveller depositing at a bank in their own region would have it guaranteed against a fixed amount of silver. This written guarantee could then be taken to a national bank outlet elsewhere in the vast country and redeemed, or given to someone to be redeemed, thus allowing freer and more secure travel and economic trade within the nation, and ensuring that it stays in each region's social and economic interests to remain at peace with the other regions. China thus wanted a lot of silver, and the British Empire, having recently sailed over to the New World and coughed on the New Worlders, had a rich supply of the stuff. | A trade link thus became established: the British bought luxury goods, the Chinese bought silver. Originally, these luxury goods tended to be durables: the ubiquitous kitchen- and table-ware which became known as 'china'. Then, the British developed a taste for tea. | Unlike durables, consumables don't suffer from market saturation to anything like the same extent. Indeed, it seems the more China produced, the more Britain consumed. The taste for tea permeated downwards through the social strata (to the extent that, by the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century, tea-drinking had become an archetypal Working Class activity), until tea-drinking came to be seen as a ubiquitous part of the British national character. | However, the British liked their tea sweet: one unit of tea mixed with 14 units of sugar. This created a new scale of demand for sugar, which came from British colonies in the New World. This, in turn, exacerbated demand for cheap manual labour, who came - unwillingly - from Africa. The North Atlantic slave trade can thus be seen as a complex 'externality' of Chinese domestic policy. Together with tobacco - another product whose initial supply increases, rather than decreases, demand, and thus quickly changes consumer preferences - demand for sugar - predicated on a taste for sweet tea - generated much of the growth in the North Atlantic slave trade, by extension the British Empire, and by further extension the wealth and productive capacity of the post-independence United States. | I guess I found this kind of 'web' of social causal factors, and the fact such banal tastes and habits led to such wealth and power for some people, and such misery and exploitation for others, fascinating and sickening in equal measure.
   
3. Last week I discovered Desmond Morris' six-part TV series 'The Human Animal' (1994) and 'the Human Sexes' (1997) are both available in full on Google video, together with a one hour 2007 retrospective on the documentary called ' Watching Desmond Morris'. Within three days, I'd devoured all thirteen hours. I find Morris' approach almost hyponotic: he might try to present himself as 'the objective scientist', but the scientific approach he's using - the relatively qualitative, observational mid-Twentieth Century 'ethnography' approach - doesn't seem to have been the dominant approach within evolutionary biology for over thirty years, since 'The Great Synthesis', which combined ethnography with heredity equations and was popularised in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, swept the more naturalistic and speculative approach Morris still uses out of the discipline. In fact, the objectivity - the scientific 'rigour' - is an act, an interesting 'character' to play, but one that I suspect Morris would find suffocating unless annealed with some other worldview. | I think Morris' other interest and vocation - surrealist painting - seems to provide this, and if anything his approach seems more to be that of a 'scientific artist' than an 'artistic scientist'. The stories he tells about humans are pregnant with pathos and absurdity: we're all 'Naked Apes' who have accidentally locked ourselves up in an 'Human Zoo', living in conditions that have been made by us but are not of our own making, reproducing instinctual action patterns in ever more obtuse ways, converting the bestial and the carnal into the institutional and metaphoric. | I see nothing whatsoever 'reductionist' in this worldview - it's oddly, hauntingly, disturbingly beautiful - but I can see how it may become 'totalising'. Better to take this perspective as one of many: to the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To the person with a well-equipped tool shed and art studio, however, the world looks like many things at once. In short, the world looks surreal.

If anyone would like me to expand any of these three embryonic threads into a full entry, let me know. (More generally, it's simply good to know that anyone reads this!)



[1] The book, not the chapter. I read fairly slowly but not that slowly...
[2] Annoyingly I can't find the article, as I can't remember many details about the interviewee. He wasn't a 'scientist', but someone who proclaimed to write into newspapers to offer a 'scientific perspective', and previously had a job in the City...

Social Death Proof

I've been neglectful of this blog. Last week I produced nothing, despite a couple of aborted attempts at entries. It's not that I have no new ideas to express - the opposite is probably closer to the truth - but simply because the act of finishing always seems so much more arduous than the act of starti...

I'm going to break with a couple of self-imposed conventions to this blog. Firstly, I'm going to comment on something 'topical' - something that's happened recently rather than years, decades or centuries ago. Secondly, I'm going to attempt to be terser. I'm a fan of terseness, but academia isn't. (I'm also a qualified fan of ambiguous writing: there's a beauty in linguistic ambiguity - in double-meaning, aphorism, allusion, inference and innuendo - which becomes lost as, in academic writing, words come to take on more consistent meaning. Still, phrases like "broken down by age and sex" make me smile wryly.) Much of the motivation for this blog is to train myself to write more 'like an academic'. Generally, the contents of this blog are meant as a middle-ground between the more focussed and directed work of academia, and the more undirected and, in the broadest possible sense, 'philosophical' (and impractical) leanings of my own mind...


I'm going to break my first self-imposed convention, not talking about something topical, twice: firstly, in mentioning this, and secondly, in mentioning this.

According to this book, these two types of event - car fatalities and media coverage of suicides - are often linked. The link has a name: "The Werther Effect", named after this.

In the book, Cialdini summarises research by a sociologist called David Phillips. Cialdini uses Phillips' research to illustrate what Cialdini calls 'Social Proof': the propensity for people to behave as others (who are like themselves) behave. (See this.) "After a suicide has made front-page news, airplanes", writes Cialdini, "- private places, corporate jets, airliners - begin falling out of the sky at an alarming rate." [pp. 143-4]

And not just airplane crashes, but also cars. Crashes occur more frequently, but also become more fatal. Phillips suggests that, just as Goethe's book over 200 years ago, about a young troubled soul who commits suicide, led to a wave of suicides amongst young people following its publication, so the publicity of the suicide of a high profile individual leads many people, who consider themselves 'similar' to the high-profile deceased, and who have also been suffering from melancholia, to be tipped towards suicidal activity. Given that most people in rich nations have access to a device that could easily and relatively inconspicuously be made lethal- i.e. an automobile - and considering death from an automobile accident is less 'shameful' than death from something more obviously self-inflicted, Phillips suggested that, through a modern day 'Werther Effect', epidemics of automobile-based concealed suicides tend to follow high publicity suicides.

This is in addition to unconcealed suicides, which also rise sharply. According to Phillips (as summarised by Cialdini), "within two months after every front-page suicide story, an average of fifty-eight more people than usual killed themselves. In a sense, each suicide story killed fifty-eight people who otherwise would have gone on living." [p. 146, my emphasis]


Back to the particular: I remember reading this article, in copy of the Independent which I picked up in a train I was travelling on a few weeks back. Should the film carry a health warning?, the article asks. The scientific consensus, to this question and others like it, seems to be 'Yes.'

Did William James 'explain postmodernism'?

William James' The Principles of Psychology was ahead of its time by at least a century.[1]

Consider the following passages from volume one [pp. 263-5], which I will quote at some length in order to reduce the risk of taking his words out of context:

Usually, the vague perception that all the words we hear belong to the same language and to the same special vocabulary in that language, and that the grammatical sequence is familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission that what we hear is sense. [...]

So delicate and incessant is this recognition by the mind of the mere fitness of words to be mentioned together that the slightest misreading, such as 'casualty' for 'causality,' or 'perpetual' for 'perceptual,' will be corrected by a listener whose attention is so relaxed that he gets no idea of the meaning of the sentence at all.

Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary, and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences with absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged. [...]

"The birds filled the tree-tops with their morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant," is a sentence I remember reading once in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried reporter, and read uncritically by many readers. An entire volume of 784 pages lately published in Boston [Substantialism or Philosophy of Knowledge, Jean Story, 1879] is composed of stuff like this passage picked out at random:

The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their outlets at the terminal loop of each culminate link on the surface of the nuclear organism is continuous as their respective atmospheric fruitage up the altitudinal limit of their expansibility, whence, when atmostophered by like but coalescing essences from higher altitudes, - those sensibly expressed as the essential qualities of external forms, - they descend, and become assimilated by the afferences of the nuclear organism.

Does this type of passage seem as familiar to you as it does to me?

Perhaps the answer depends on the content of your academic education. In my case, a postgraduate degree in 'critical theory', which introduced me to the wonders of postmodernism.
Replicating James' wonderfully wistful way of doing psychological research, I picked up my copy of Critical Theory: A Reader, (Edited by Douglas Tallack, head of my critical theory department) and picked out, as James did, a passage at random:

All history is inseparable from economy in the limited sense of the word, that of a certain kind of savings. Man's return - the relationship linking him profitably to man-being, conserving it. The economy, as a law of appropriation, is a phallocentric production. The opposition appropriate/inappropriate, proper/improper, clean/unclean, mine/not mine (the valorization of the sameself), organises the opposition identity/difference. Everything takes place as if, in a split second, man and being had propiated each other.

What James wrote next, after quoting Jean Story, seems equally appropriate to my quote of Helene Cixous:

There are every year works published whose contents show them to be by real lunatics. To the reader, the book quoted from seems pure nonsense from beginning to end. It is impossible to divide, in such a case, just that soft of feeling of rational relation between the words may have appeared to the author's mind. The border line between the objective sense and nonsense, impossible. Subjectively, any collection of words may make sense - event the wildest words in a dream - if one only does not doubt their belonging together.

The next passage is even more illustrative, for anyone with a passing familiarity with the intellectual genealogy of critical theory and postmodern theory [be glad if you don't have this]:

Take the obscurer passages in Hegel: it is a fair question whether the rationality included in them be anything more than the fact that the words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung together on a scheme of predication and relation, - immediacy, self-relation, and what not, - which has habitually recurred. Yet there there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.

As Noam Chomsky said: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

Given the capacity of language to construct 'semantically empty' sentences, I wonder how much, and to what extent, further education - and indeed what we have in mind when we talk of 'class' and 'culture' more generally - involves helping people to write collections of words which have this 'vague perception' of belonging "to the same language and to the same special vocabulary". Perhaps being middle-class, or a university graduate, allows us [for I fear only people who have been to university will read this] to better speak, write, and read an economically and culturally privileged 'specialised vocabulary' than other people, without ever quite being aware of it?

As Tony Blair said: "Britain forward not back."

[1]Of course, in making this statement, I'm suggesting a teleological view of history and human scientific progress, with 'knowledge' some form of ever expanding monument to humanity's benevolent dominion over all other aspects of the physical and biological world, directed towards some form of as-yet-unrealised-but-ultimately-inevitable technotopia: a 'singularity' perhaps.
I don't, in fact, believe this teleological narrative, especially with respect to social knowledge (an ongoing 'motif' the reader may pick up from my writings is the sense that many aspects of social theory seemed somehow more impressive and persuasive in the middle of the Twentieth Century than at the century's end). Nevertheless, the statement is the most concise (if philosophically inaccurate) one I can present as to my views on James, who managed to use introspection more effectively as an empirical research method than anyone else I have read. James' programme of 'radical empiricism' - treating subjective experiences as valid datums with with psychological theories may be tested and developed - was simply too radical for most of the Twentieth Century, and a 'Jamesian' research programme, for example with the relatively recent growth in the field of 'consciousness studies', only seems to have emerged within the last decade or so.

Sizing Up

Every so often, and not too often, I come across a book, an article, a chapter, or even a paragraph which contains an idea whose implications much exceed its word length. One such passage is as follows:

In general, we we would expect that factors will be perceived as causal to the degree that their magnitudes resemble the magnitude of the effects they are adduced to explain. In the development of causal schemata, both the notion that large causes can produce large effects and the notion that small causes can produce small effects probably precede the development of the notion that large causes can produce small effects. The notion that small causes can produce large effects probably develops very late and never attains very great stability.

This dry statement comes near the end of a relatively well known paper by the psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson, written in 1977 and published in the Psychological Review (Vol 84, No. 3) , called 'Telling More than We Can Know' (An allusion to and inversion of Michael Polanyi's famous aphorism about tacit knowledge that 'we can know more than we can tell').

The paper was written as a summary of, and attempt at explaining the results of, a large number of experiments involving subjects' verbal reports of explanations for their behaviours in a variety of carefully controlled situations. (Or 'formalised anecdotes', as I would call them, if I am to be consistent with myself last week when I referred to ethnographies as anecdotes.) The counter-intuitive discovery of many of these experiments seemed to be that people often don't know why they do the things that they do: we often act for one reason, but think we act that way for another.

Nisbett and Wilson's explanation - a meta-explanation, as it were - is that we possess a limited range of cognitive archetypes for causal schemas, intuitive patterns we apply to events in order to explain their occurance. Following from this, causal explanations which fit our causal schema more closely appear more intuitively plausible than those which don't, even if the plausible causal explanations can't really explain (or predict) anything, and the implausible causal explanations can.

The entire article is well worth reading. Nisbett and Wilson describe a number of qualities of intuitive causal schema, each of which have profound implications that, even thirty years after publication, still seem underexplored. As I said at the start of this entry, however, I'm going to concentrate on the magnitude-matching aspect of the causal schema, as described in the quoted passage. Nisbett and Wilson seemed to believe what they were writing isn't completely inconsequential to everyday life, culture, history, and common understanding, as the passage immediately following the one quoted suggests:

It is likely that conspiracy theories often feed on the discrepancy between officially provided causal explanations and the large effect they are invoked to explain. It is outrageous that a single, pathetic, weak figure like Lee Harvey Oswald should alter world history. When confronted with large effects, it is to comparably large causes that we turn for explanations. [When some insomniacs were asked] why they slept so little, both on particular occasions and in general, they were inclined to explain their insomnia in terms of the stress of their current life situation or even in terms of neurosis of chronic anxiety. Smaller causes, such as an overheated room, a tendency to work or exercise or smoke just before going to bed, or a tendency to keep irregular hours, were overlooked.

My guess is that this tendency to link magnitude of effect to magnitude of cause causes us to miss, or greatly under-value, a large number of seemingly inconsequential ,is-it-plugged-in-and-switched-on, explanations to some important social issues, and through this to miss the obvious. As a now relatively well-known and widely-publicised example, consider the theory that there is a link between abortion rates and crime. Another, slightly less well-known candidate for the unduly-and-implausibly simple cause-effect schema is provided by the (somewhate eccentric) experimental psychologist Seth Roberts in the form of the Shangri-la Diet. "Of course it won't work: it's too simple," seems to be the monotone chorus of response to Roberts' suggestion. "It doesn't add up." (As an example of this response, see the end of this generally excerable video about the diet, by Simon Jenkins, a nutritional scientist: a battle seems to start to rage between the 'trained' part of him which knows it should be tested and evaluated;and the latent, 'intuitive' part of him which simply can't find the idea credible.)

Within physical systems, perhaps it's easier to see how small causes can lead to big effects: within systems engineering, control theory (formally known by the much more intriguing name of cybernetics) teaches one to think about feedback loops. Positive feedback means small causes can have big effects; negative feedback means the converse: it all depends on how the causal structure in between is 'wired'.
Unfortunately, without being taught to think unnaturally, our minds tend not to consider the amplifiers and inhibitors which may lie between A and B. By default, our minds just tie A and B together with Causal String: if I feel a big tug at my end of the Causal String, I'm going to guess there's something big at the other end, even though it may just be an Imp-with-a-Winch (or an operational amplifier).

Additional Viewing:

1. http://www.b3ta.cr3ation.co.uk/data/jpg/inquest.jpg
   

First Post: Theorists and Taxonomisers

Hello!
Welcome to my first post. I intend to write something- substantial, semi-coherent - around once a week. The theme will generally be quite 'academic', focussing on particular, relatively long-standing and atemporal, rather than topical and ephemoral, issues, but this is not strictly an 'academic blog'.


Last week here at York was the 'British Association for the Advancement of Science's annual 'Festival of Science'. Perhaps attending academic lectures isn't most people's idea of a fun activity, and they've got a point, but I attended five seminars during the week, on topics ranging from anthropology to psychology to sociology, and certainly didn't feel afterwards like it was a waste of time.

What is 'science'? Going by the previous week's experience, it seems to mean something quite different to the anthropologists and the psychologists than the sociologists. (Some of the sociologists called themselves 'anthropologists', but I don't think the anthropologists presenting would: they didn't use enough statistics).
Of course the question is fuzzy and the answer will always be contentious, but I think there are two important aspects to most forms of scientific enterprise:

1. Hitherto implicit, fuzzy, and only locally-accessible knowledge is made explicit, exact, and (more) globally accessible. In short, 'facts' are generated, stored, amassed. The magnitude of the available data grows and grows. [Such enterprise generates knowledge]
   
2. The massive proliferation of data is then 'reduced' in magnitude through formal, replicable analyses. This data-reduction occurs through a process of generalisation. Similarities between datums are identified, abduced through pattern-recognition schemas, and inferences made about associations between data items, which can then be described more concisely than can the data itself ( data -> theory). Furthermore, the theories developed to link data can be used to make plausible guesses about phenomena which have not been recorded and observed. More prosaically, this part of the scientific enterprise allows people to use knowledge about things that have been observed can be used to make guesses about things that haven't. (And these things that haven't been observed may be unobserved because they haven't happened yet: i.e. science can be used to made predictions!) [Such enterprise generates understanding]
   

Of course, it's a lot more complex and nuanced than this - for one thing there's a lot of reflexivity between the 1. and 2. - but I find this a good way of thinking about the question.
Moreover, I think this is a good way of starting to think about the sociology (as it were) behind science, because my feeling is that the sort of people who tend to focus on the first part of science - the Taxonomisers - tend to be quite different to the sorts of people who focus on the second aspect - the Theorists. Taxonomisers like facts for the sake of having facts; for Theorists facts are just grist for the mill, and the less facts they have to deal with directly, the better. Facts for Theorists are just 'instances' of a general pattern, 'cases' for testing general rules. By contrast, for Taxonomisers, facts are the reason to wake up in the morning, and fact-generation is what puts food on the table.

Another way of thinking about this is to consider the differences between and gaining knowledge and gaining understanding. Very often, gaining knowledge is much more important. Consider a London black cab driver: to have (the) knowledge of the city's routes allows them to do their job; if they had deeper understanding of the generative mechanisms which begot the city road network they need to memorise- perhaps an understanding of the fractal-like nature of city growth around small centres, and the propensity for urban centres to be start near sources of clean water - then this wouldn't help.

Perhaps you can tell: I'm more of a Theorist than a Taxonomiser. I find Taxonomisers dull, ignorant pedants, obsessed with semantics, unable to see the wood for the trees (or the trees for the bark). Taxonomisers, conversely, probably consider the Theorist's enterprise foolish reductionism. Within the social sciences, Historians are probably good Taxonomisers, and Social Psychologists seem good Theorists. (The Historical Sociologist Charles Tilly does a good job of combining the two enterprises.)

Ontological experience, however, is perhaps closer to Taxonomy than Theory: we don't experience 'patterns' or 'trends' of experience, but individual instances of experience. Most people are Taxonomisers, I believe, to a greater extent than they are Theorists: informal taxonomy - experience destined to remain only implicitly and locally known - is anecdote, and people love anecdotes. (Sociologists call anecdotes 'ethnographies'.)