Yesterday I was in Chicago. In the afternoon, thanks to an invitation
from Mike Ronkoske, I did a presentation for a group of planners and
clients at Energy BBDO. The theme was anthropology and ethnography. I was attempting to describe how an anthropologist notices, and how he gets from noticing to insight.
One of my talking points was a weird thing I noticed on the Connecticut
train. Guys were reading papers and magazines, and snapping each page
as they went. In and of itself, this sort of thing is annoying and
banal in equal measure, the sort of thing we notice only to dismiss.
But in this case, I found myself wondering, why snapping? Almost
nothing is actually nothing. The surface of social life is littered
with tiny but telling details. The anthropologist’s job is to notice
and notice and notice. So I noticed snapping.
And at this point in my presentation I actually got a little tearful, I
have to tell you, and, as I don’t have to tell you, there is no crying
in anthropology, so I kinda had to get a grip. But I found myself
telling these young planners about the time I sat beside Marshall
Sahlins, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, as he
read one of my papers. Professor Sahlins was traveling at speed
through my paper, not because it was well written but because not even
bad writing could slow him down. Suddenly, he stopped absolutely dead
in his tracks and said, “hm, I wonder why that is.”
I was watching a very smart man acknowledge the limits of
understanding. You could almost hear him thinking, “why can’t I think
this?” This is the secret of noticing. Spotting things that defy
expectation, things that don’t “compute.” The temptation for the
rest of us is to “fake the results” and assimilate the anomalous to
existing categories. Good noticers are fearless noticers.
…
(via Sierra’s shared items in Google Reader)
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