Midnight Mutterings | Cognitive disuniformity

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

I don’t know a lot about anthropology. I did take an undergraduate class in anthropology and I once took a class taught by Margaret Mead. That was a fluke. My first job was working as a lab tech at Delafield Hospital for Cancer Research on the campus of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (the medical school). One of the perks that low level (and poorly paid) workers such as myself received was six free credit hour classes at Columbia each semester. One of the classes I took was the one with Margaret Mead. At the time she was the Curator at the Museum of Natural History as well as Professor of Anthropology at Columbia. I had never heard of her. However, at the time I was looking at the options of classes, I read an article about her in the New Yorker and her class met at a time that fit my schedule. That class was an education in itself in so many ways.

But I didn’t learn the term cognitive disuniformity from Margaret Mead. It was from another anthropologist at a different university on the West Coast. That anthropologist was Michelle Z. Rosaldo. I don’t think I took a class from her, but I did go to some of her lectures and read at least one of her books, which seems not to survived all of my many moves around the county. And now I can’t find any mention of the term ‘cognitive disuniformity’ anywhere on the internet, nor can I find the Title of the Rosaldo book that I remember reading and owning all those years ago, when I learned about cognitive disuniformity. Meaning simply that we learn and know and function from different knowledge depending on our power status in the culture.

I did find this quote:

‘The Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo Prize honors the memory of Professor Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo (1944, New York – 1981, Philippines), known to her friends and colleagues as Shelly, was a social, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist famous for her studies of the Ilongot tribe in the Philippines and for her pioneering role in women’s studies and the anthropology of gender. Michelle Rosaldo wrote or edited several important works in the anthropology of women and gender relations and co-founded the Program in Feminist Studies here at Stanford University. In 1979 she received Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Award for outstanding service to undergraduate education. Michelle Rosaldo died from an accidental fall while conducting fieldwork in the Philippines in 1981, cutting short one of the brightest anthropology careers of her generation.”

Rosaldo surfaced again in my own consciousness when I was living in Seattle as she was good friends with my next door neighbors at the time she died at age 37. So there was much conversation about her and her work. I was reading a lot of feminist writing then as always. Rosaldo was considered a feminist-anthropologist and well a cognitive-anthropologist (as in how culture influences cognition and beliefs and well as behavior. Still no mention of cognitive disuniformity, though.

So here it is as best as I remember: In any human culture, there are powerful as well as less powerful people and they must ‘know’ different things in order for the culture as well as its power differential to remain intact. That is, the less powerful people in the culture need to know much more about the lives and ways of the powerful in order to survive, while the more powerful have to NOT know much about the lives of the less powerful in order to defend and maintain the status quo.

A couple of easy examples: Sigmund Freud is said to have asked Marie Bonaparte ‘What does a woman want?’ It seems unlikely that Marie Bonaparte asked Freud the parallel question: ‘What does a man want?’ Her very survival would have depended on knowing the answer to that question in order to have reached adulthood alive and well.

As I have mentioned too many times, I grew up in the South where white people, especially men, were powerful in the culture just by having been born white males. And white people of any gender knew little about Black people’s lives. Had they known more, they would have had to change. Change the status quo, possibly change the power differential, or, at the very least, suffer cognitive dissonance and the discomfort of holding two opposing belief systems in one brain. Black people knew everything about white people’s lives. They were in their homes, in the most personal and private aspects of the more powerful white people’s lives in order to survive. Most white people I knew had never been inside a Black family’s home. There would be no necessity for such a visit. Whether they would be welcome is not even an issue. Had white people visited a Black family’s home, learned about Black family life, they would likely have had to change their thinking and feeling, and thus threaten the status quo, the power differential on which to culture depends on for its function. I’m sure Michelle Rosaldo explained cognitive disuniformity more clearly and efficiently. But once one begins to look for it, it’s everywhere, particularly in economic, social, and professional interactions, as well as in race and class status.

I am beginning to see how it functions in political relationships. In how, when we begin to view with empathy, with decency, to listen, to see, we become less comfortable with exercising our power, our judgement of the less powerful people in our lives, in our culture, in cultures other than our own. We begin to question the status quo. We get uncomfortable. Then, I hope, we begin to change.