Throughout time there have been a number of attempts to transgress the boundaries separating groups from each other and “go native” (Smith, n.d.). John Howard Griffin painted his face black and travelled through the south of the USA during the height of racial segregation to be able to experience the treatment of a black man (Fay, 1996, p.13). Liza Crihfield Dalby wanted to write her PhD on the life and experiences of a Japanese geisha, and thought the only way to do this was to live as a geisha in Kyoto for a year (Dalby, 1983). It would seem that by doing this they would be able to gain an insider perspective on the culture and group they were living with? Yet herein lies the illusion: no matter how long they played their ‘insider’ role, it would remain a role. Their upbringing had instilled in them a set of values and beliefs, by themselves perhaps unrecognized or unacknowledged, but nevertheless existing and fundamentally different to that of the group they were studying. Furthermore, if ever they were to find themselves in a precarious situation, they would always be able to resort back to their original identity, and not have to bare the consequences as a black man or a geisha might. They are able to wear the mask of an insider, but under the mask the outsider stays the same.
This can be further illustrated: if we say that the social and cultural world shape a person or group’s identity, regarding the fact that society and culture differs hugely from place to place, and insist on the fact that to understand an insider you must be an insider yourself, then we must conclude that any understanding between groups is impossible. This, in turn, would mean that social science would become “radically unlike ‘hard’ science” (Smith, n.d.), because no research would be possible on a neutral and objective basis. In fact, every group would have to be in charge of its own social research, “be its own social scientist” (Fay, 1996, p.12). Still, if we are not able understand another group, we would consequently also not be able to understand the research done by an insider social scientist of the other group. Each group would be its own isolated unit and incapable of sharing any knowledge.
However, there are problems to be found in using the word ‘group’. By picturing a group as a homogenous set of individuals, we are categorizing its members as all being equal and being members of only that group. We are forgetting that categories as broad as ‘women’, ‘South American’, ‘adopted children’, etc. are no indication of individual identity and experiences. Indeed, by placing all adopted children in the same group, we are neglecting the fact that adoption can be a completely different experience for one child compared to another. The differences between members of one group may actually outweigh their similarities (Bridges, 2001, p.3; Fay, 1996, p. 53) and insiders of groups may insist on a distinction being made between each other, therefore Argentineans might find it offensive to be put in the same category as Bolivians or vice versa. But if we carry these divisions within categories further, then we must distinguish between Argentineans from Buenos Aires and those from Patagonia, in Buenos Aires between the poor and the wealthy, within the poor between the homeless and people living in small shacks, within the homeless between men and women, within men between old and young, and so on until there is no more than one person left for each category – which takes us back to the theory of solipsism, that only I can know myself, and therefore to the impossibility of mutual understanding. In social research difficulties may arise as many of the “political and ethical dilemmas (...) stem from the researcher’s simultaneous occupation of a status as insider and outsider in relation to those they are researching” (Charles, 1997, p.394), since boundaries between groups are never clear-cut.
But this evokes the idea that ultimately, if I am the only person left in my category and nobody from outside my category can truly understand me, I must know my own self best, and this idea we must question. For many instances come to mind where we don’t really understand ourselves. When writing an exam, for example, we are not conscious of all the thought processes going on within our head and we would have a hard time explaining how we wrote it. Fay writes that “the mind does not have an unmediated knowledge of itself” (1996, p.19), meaning that we cannot necessarily interpret the experiences and feelings we have. Similarly I have no detailed recollection of the day my dog was put to sleep, it went by ‘in a blur’. Not only did I not have full knowledge of myself on that day but with time it has changed further: my personal account of that day would probably be very inaccurate because tinted by my emotions and patchy with suppressed memories (Bridges, 2001, p.2). Furthermore, it is well known that a stressed person is the last to realize or acknowledge it, what is needed is precisely a person on the outside – a doctor, a parent, a wife – to diagnose the symptoms and “look at our taken-for-granted experience through (...) the eye of a stranger” (Bridges, 2001, p.3), so from an outsider perspective. Our insider perspective does not necessarily work to our advantage because, as Fay puts it, “knowledge of what we are experiencing always involves an interpretation of these experiences” (1996, p.19).
Likewise, being a member of a group does not always give us the best knowledge of it. For example, a sports player is not automatically the best sports commentator (Fay, 1996, p.20), and being a native speaker of a language often means that you have more difficulties explaining grammar rules than a non-native speaker. Merton is his studies found that “the judgements of ‘insiders’ are best trusted when they assess groups other than their own” (1972, p.18). Distance can create better knowledge because it gives a wider view of things: Fay gives the example of Hitler’s biographers who were able to understand him – not in the sense of being sympathetic toward him but of giving an accurate account of his character and motivations – precisely because their distance enabled them to make a connection between internal emotions and external situations (Fay, 1996, p.24).
Returning to examples from literature, we must find that not always is first hand experience the clue to accurate and momentous narrating. Phillippe Ariès in his book Centuries of Childhood was able to create a picture of children’s life and status throughout the Middle Ages that a medieval author probably could not have achieved (Ariès, 1960; cited in Fay, 1996, p.27). Ariès with the broader viewpoint of an outsider was able to focus on those aspects that struck him as strange or different, creating a vibrant image for his readers. But how can we reconcile this argument with the one made earlier that Jung Chang was only able to write such an extraordinary account because she was an ‘insider’?
Maybe the answer lies in that ‘knowledge’ does not rely solely on whether one is a member of a certain group or not. ‘Knowing’ something implies that we understand its meaning and have made sense of it, not that we have an empathetic understanding of it. Fay compares making sense of something with “trying to decipher a difficult poem rather than trying to achieve some sort of inner mental union with its author” (1996, p.25). Sensitivity and criticality are the relevant criteria to understanding rather than being an insider or outsider to a group – whether we are speaking about women, Muslims or Russian peasants. Our two authors, Jung Chang and Phillippe Ariès, achieved the quality of their respective writings because they had a good grasp of the topic they were writing about. Both in their own ways were able to understand their subject matter so well because of the perspective they had; in the case of Chang that of an insider and in the case of Ariès that of an outsider.
Overall, in my opinion you do not have to ‘be’ one to ‘know’ one. Understanding human feelings and behaviour is a delicate matter and requires more than shared experiences and surroundings. Whether we are sensitive and critical enough to ‘know’ another person is a more important criteria than our status as insider or outsider. An insider may however be more aware of the issues at hand; he may not have the automatic ability to truly understand but his status might facilitate it. If we really had to ‘be’ one to ‘know’ one, most of our world today would become pointless: media, research, welfare, etc. Why be informed about the war in Iraq if we can neither understand the Iraqis nor the soldiers nor the politicians? Why make any judgement, any protest? Because our insider status as human beings gives us the sensitivity to reject violence and suffering, even if we are outsiders on all other factors.
Bibliography:
Phillippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, Middlesex: Penguin, 1960
David Bridges, ‘The Ethics of Outsider Research’ in Mike McNamee & David Bridges (eds),
The Ethics of Educational Research, special issue of Journal of Philosophy of
Education 35.3, 2001: electronic journal
Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, London: Flamingo, 1991
Nickie Charles, ‘Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork’ in The Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, Vol. 3, No. 2, June 1997: pp. 394-395, accessed 19.11.06
through JSTOR
Liza Crihfield Dalby, Geisha, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983
Brian Fay, Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science: A Multicultural Approach, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996
Robert K. Merton, ‘Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge’ in The
American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 1, Varieties of Political Expression in
Sociology, July 1972: pp. 9-47, accessed 16.11.06 through JSTOR
Richard Smith n.d., Do we have to be one to know one?, accessed 16.11.06 on
http://www.dur.ac.uk/r.d.smith/methodlectself1.html
