Do data always have a ‘correct’ interpretation? Reading a clash in data for conceptions of culture, authority and alternative worldviews

I recently had the opportunity to engage with a group of academics puzzling over the meaning of a large dataset that did not make straight-forward sense. The group who had collected the data were experienced academics from a Western university. The data had come from a very large group of teachers in a rural setting in South Asia. These teachers had been invited to digitally train on a new method of teaching some basics of their subject. The training had been presented as a Professional Development Activity and carried a certificate of completion.

The Western academics had been careful to deliver the training and collect follow-up data through competent local agents. To assess the translation of the training into daily teaching, a survey of 1000 participants was carried out soon after the training had been delivered. A large majority of the participants answered in the affirmative on a questionnaire asking if they were incorporating their new knowledge into daily practice. The results were not surprising because no special equipment or digital facility was required to include the new method in classroom practice.

However, in an effort to drill down into the data and understand what had worked, the academics also carried out detailed interviews of about one-fifth of the survey participants. They were taken aback to find that the results of this qualitative data-collection exercise returned negative results. They suggested that, contrary to the survey results, the majority of the participants were not using the new training. It was this contradiction and how to address and interpret it that the academics were puzzling over at the session I happened to attend.

The discussion was lively and interesting; some other academics, who had not been part of the data-collecting group, also confirmed their own previous experience of similar contradictions when undertaking research in the region. It was easy to see how the contradiction in the data carried a whiff of dishonesty on the part of the participants though the data-collecting group were wary of jumping to conclusions. Still, some of the researchers present voiced their opinion clearly that only one result could be ‘correct’ and they felt that the interviews were much more likely to have shown a true picture and should be given greater credence. Why, then, did the participants answer in the affirmative on the survey questionnaire?

Making data speak

Amongst a minority of those present, including me, there was a sense that data do not always end up answering the question asked of them, or at least, not only what is asked of them. Sometimes more insightful data interpretation requires changing the lens through which a dataset is viewed. One such scholar suggested that a local notion of ‘politeness’ might have played a role in the large affirmative survey result. The researchers were also kind enough to engage with my observation that perhaps neither one of the datasets was ‘wrong’: thinking of my own Indian background, I was curious to know whether the researchers had thought about the larger cultural context of their research. Had they, for example, looked into what ‘Professional Development Activity’ meant to the teachers being trained? In answer, one of the academics pointed out that the pupils these teachers were teaching had been found to struggle with some very basic learning on a number of occasions so the need for professional development should have been self-evident. Another academic confirmed that their group had been confused by enthusiastically-organised professional development sessions on earlier occasions too where, for some strange reason, very little time had been allocated for actual professional development activities. They persevered, however, believing that, the very holding of the sessions suggested that a space existed where, with time and effort, professional development could be supported. Yet these contradictions in the attitudes of the local teachers made them pause and wonder about the nature of this space and the best way of using it to meet teacher-development goals.

At this point I would like to quote the post-colonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to frame the part-reflection, part-analysis of this question that follows. In her ground-breaking essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, Spivak had discussed general theory with examples drawn from Indian history because, in her words: ‘I turn to Indian material because, in the absence of advanced disciplinary training, that accident of birth and education has provided me with a sense of the historical canvas, a hold on some of the pertinent languages that are useful tools for a bricoleur…’ (p. 281).

‘White men saving brown women from brown men’

Staying with Spivak’s essay, I want to draw attention to an  example of ‘differend’ – the ‘inaccessibility of, or untranslatability from, one mode of discourse in a dispute to another’ (p. 301) used by her. Contesting Foucault and Deleuze’s position, which seemed to suggest that if the intellectuals made way for the ‘subaltern’ to speak directly, then a ‘pure’ subaltern consciousness, free of ideology, would express itself. To clarify, in our case, the term ‘subaltern’ does not apply; I do, however, think of the ‘data-providers’ as the less powerful side in academic data-collection exercises. In this, I take knowledge and control of the process to be sources of power that reside with the designers of the exercise, who also collect data on parameters selected by them.

Spivak discusses the difficulty of interpreting the abolition of sati by the British rulers of India in 1829. Sati was a practice that was neither widespread nor did it have any particular class- or caste-based significance attached to it. It was an extreme practice, though, in which a Hindu woman chose to self-immolate on her dead husband’s pyre in an act of marital devotion and ‘purity’, rather than live on without him.

Even though sati was not widely practiced, it carried a high emotional charge and the women committing sati were venerated as martyrs who had displayed the highest example of feminine virtue. The abolition of sati was carried out despite nativist opposition and was justified by the British in moral terms as securing the helpless woman’s freedom to live on despite her husband’s death. In Spivak’s frank analysis it ‘has been generally understood as a case of “White men saving brown women from brown men”‘ (p. 298).

Against this, however, Spivak also cites the nativist Indian argument that insisted in equally moral terms that the ‘women actually wanted to die’ (p. 298). To the advocates of sati, the abolition denied a native woman the freedom to conduct herself in accordance with her religious and moral beliefs and was thus a violation of a moral law, seen differently. It is here that Spivak cites Jean-Francois Lyotard’s term ‘differend’  (p. 301) as perhaps the right one to understand these clashing viewpoints on women’s ‘sacrifice’ of themselves.

What stands out in Spivak’s analysis is that the woman’s voice is not available; others speak for her. Further, her point is not to question the abolition of sati as a good thing but rather to point out the difficulties of reading an act so clear and, one would assume, transparent as a woman burning herself on the pyre of her dead husband.

Again, the point that comes through is that even if the women had been given a chance to speak, they would have spoken with the ideas available to them. Both the British and the native Indians spoke out of their own contemporary traditions. The Indian position has been shown as ‘superstitious’ and ‘patriarchal’ through more than a century of history-writing.

Interestingly, Spivak makes clear the ideological nature of the British position too. She writes: ‘Perhaps sati should have been read with martyrdom, with the defunct husband standing in for the transcendental One; or with war, with the husband standing in for sovereign or state, for whose sake an intoxicating ideology of self-sacrifice can be mobilized (p.302).’ Dying for one’s ‘nation’ was more modern and acceptable to the British but not necessarily any more rational than a woman sacrificing herself for a religious ideal.

In the context of our current discussion, cultural influences and the difficulty of interpreting them can be equally pertinent to less dramatic acts of answering surveys and questionnaires.

What complicates cross-cultural interpretations in South Asia even further is the situation that Homi Bhabha, and other scholars, have tried to capture in notions of cultural ‘hybridity’ or ‘creolization’. The latter term is applied mostly to discussions about territories in the ‘New World’, however, Robert Young’s explanation of the process as an ‘unconscious hybridity, whose pregnancy gives birth to new forms of amalgamation rather than contestation’ (Ashcroft et al, 2000, p. 52) can be seen in South Asia too.

Bhabha asserts that these phenomena often occur in ”border situations and thresholds … where identities are performed and contested”. Instead of stressing the binary oppositions between groups and nations on national, cultural, racial or gender-based grounds, he is interested in how identities are negotiated, shaped and re-shaped at the faultlines of these differences. With nearly 200 years of imperial British rule in the region, such border situations were not hard to find.

Next, I would like to briefly look at Bernard S. Cohn’s exploration of the representation of authority in British India. This essay not only illuminates some of the mechanics of the processes involved in shaping hybridity or creolization, but it also touches on a concept relevant to analysing the conflicting responses from the teachers in the sample we were discussing, i.e., response to how authority is represented.

Cultural construction in interstitial spaces

Bhabha introduced the concept of ‘interstitial spaces’  to studying culture  to describe places and times where ‘the overlap and displacement of the domains of difference’ occur and where ‘intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated’ (Bhabha, 1994, p.2).

Many cultural structures and values in South Asia have evolved in the contemporary period through a close interaction between the ‘traditional’ cultural norms and the form of Western modernity practiced by the imperial British rule in India from about 1757 to 1947. The comparatively small number of British who administered the authority of the Raj over a very large number of Indians meant that merely imposing new norms and values through force, as in the abolition of sati, was not as frequent an experience as often imagined, except for maintenance of British rule itself. Without denying the cruelties of subjection, it may be asserted that in the cultural sphere, contestation and negotiation were resorted to more often than might be supposed from an overview of the historical record.

In Cohn’s telling of the great Delhi Durbar, or imperial assemblage, of 1877 it is clear that it was an occasion when the British authorities took time and trouble to adopt the rituals of the Indian imperial courts to represent their authority to the locals in forms acceptable to the latter.

‘The princes of India bless you’

Discussing the ways in which the British rulers created a ‘ritual idiom’ for their authority in India, Cohn unpacks the meaning of the aforementioned Durbar, when Queen Victoria was proclaimed the Empress of India. By this Durbar the imperial authority of the defeated and deposed Mughal emperor was ritually replaced by the authority of the British monarch.

Those in charge of the Durbar were divided over the most effective way to proceed. The British had to constantly map an unfamiliar ‘sociology’ onto the cultural landscapes they were familiar with, i.e., society in Britain. Some of those involved viewed India as a feudal society with a ‘natural aristocracy’ of princes and local rulers worth cultivating to secure the obedience of the people through them.

The Viceroy, Lord Lytton, and his supporters therefore attempted to consciously create a new ‘idiom’ for the new rule. They deliberately hybridised British and Indian courtly forms and meanings. This was  to ensure that both parties to the ‘contract’ – the Indians and the British – could read the ceremonies by their own cultural understandings of  what the relationship between the sovereign and the people should be.

The need for such efforts was clear to Lytton and others.  Cohn gives several examples to show how, prior to the deposition of the Mughal emperor, a European mercantile eye had often misunderstood the deeply symbolic nature of their interactions with the ruling elite of India. One would suffice here: the main ritual at the Mughal court used to be ‘an act of incorporation’. At this, the persons being honoured by the ruler presented gold coins or other jewels and valuables to him as a peshkash, and he, in turn, presented them with similar valuables and clothing called khelat. The gestures carried symbolic meaning whereby the favoured person was ‘incorporated’ into the being of the emperor.

Outwardly, the ritual was carried out as an exchange of goods and valuables. Yet, there were other rules around the gifts exchanged (for example, the emperor’s gift was carefully preserved and displayed and not sold or given away by the recipients and their descendants) that raised it in the eyes of the Indians above a mere monetary exchange. The British, however, saw it ‘following their own cultural codes, and assumed there was a direct quid pro quo involved’ (p. 170).

In the period prior to the formal deposition of the Mughals, when the British  held nominal authority over the emperor’s territories, they kept the ceremony but were not averse to ‘recycling’ the presents they received. They gave to one Indian party what they had received from another, and sometimes sold the gifts by auction (p. 172). To quote Cohn:  ‘Mughal ritual might seem to have been retained but the meanings had been changed’ (p. 172).

Such cultural misunderstandings on a very large scale added fat to the fire that finally burned as  the First War of Indian Independence in 1857 (described as the Indian Mutiny by many British historians). British authority was re-established through much blood and tears on both sides in 1858. At the Durbar in 1877 the Viceroy was keen to assuage local feelings while  impressing the queen’s authority upon the people.

The  result was a form of  rituals at the Delhi Durbar that many experienced British civil servants found ‘”trivial and silly”‘ (p. 191). The official painter was horrified at the ‘garish’ mix-and-match in the scenario he was commanded to memorialise for posterity. Following the Mughal precedent, the attending Indian princes received presents from the imperial ruler, only the presents  did not take the form of khelat. Instead the princes received ‘shield-shaped banners’ and crests in ‘the European mode’ (p. 191) so that the Indian princes recognised the familiar rituals of imperial authority, as well as the changing nature of it.

Despite the horror of the detractors, the efforts seem not to have been in vain. Their success was evident at the Durbar itself when Sindhia, one of the most powerful princes of India, stood up and, it is believed, spontaneously addressed the queen as:

‘Shah in Shah, Padshah, May God bless you. The princes of India bless you and pray that your hukumat [rule]… may remain steadfast forever’ (p. 206).

The prince completely omitted addressing the queen by the new and unfamiliar title of kaiser-i-hind that had been decided on. However, what is of import here is his spontaneous gesture of loyalty. The viceroy’s efforts with the hybridised rites and rituals had made an emotional connection through recognised practice, enough to bring forth an emotional response. The lack of such emotional recognition had often set Indian princes on a path against the British which changed significantly after this ceremony. Cohn asserts that ‘the codification of the ritual idiom’ (p. 208) at the Durbar ‘set the terms of discourse of [even] the nationalist movement [that ended the empire] in its beginning phases’ (p. 209). Moreover, ‘[T]he British idiom did not die out easily or quickly,’ Cohn says, ‘and it may still be alive in various forms’ (p. 209).

Performing modernity

Agreeing with Cohn, I suggest that many South Asians in professional development contexts still draw upon a ‘cultural symbolic constitution’ that was forged in the interstitial spaces of the colonial era. A ‘cultural symbolic constitution’ shapes our engagement with ‘cosmologies, world views, ethical systems, legal codes, definitions of governmental units and social groups, ideologies, religious doctrines, myths, rituals, procedures, and rules of etiquette’ (Imden, quoted in Cohn 1983, p. 173). I suggest  that the conflicting data from the teachers that we were discussing can be explained in terms of the attitudes towards ‘authority’ that are part of the South Asian cultural symbolic constitution. In this constitution, in the way described by Cohn, sometimes the form of the representation of authority and the response to it is read as being more important than its substance.

First, even after 70 years of independence, in many places, particularly in small towns and rural areas, the respect for British, and by extension Western, knowledge retains its authority, even though it is often contested vocally. Thus, projects run by Western researchers, even through local agents, often carry this weight of authority.

Second, in cases where Western researchers approach participants through educational bodies, a further layer of authority is added.

Third, digital media carries its own form of authority as a symbol of that which is modern and powerful.

The Country Comparison tool of the Cultural Factor Group, building on the research insights of Professor Geert Hofstede, awards most South Asian countries a score of between 55 and 80 on the ‘Power-Distance‘ dimension. These high scores mean that the people’s attitude towards authority is: ‘dependent on the boss or the power holder for direction’. The pattern is of having a ‘paternalistic leader, [where] management directs, gives reason / meaning to ones [sic] work life and rewards in exchange for loyalty from employees’ [emphasis mine].

Under the circumstances, with three layers of authority tacitly driving the uptake of a course, it would not be surprising that a good number of participants took the expectation to do the course as the direction to do so.

However, the relationship of individuals with professional authority, and what it can expect from the individual, is a complex one in the region. As shown in the efforts made by the imperial British at the Delhi Durbar to connect to the ‘cultural symbolic constitution’ of the people, representations of authority carry distinct meanings to the recipients. No authority is likely to gain the support it desires if the forms of its representation are not fully recognised.

In our example, to the Western academics, it was seen as self-evident that teaching is a ‘profession’ in which professional development training should lead to better professional results, i.e., the improvement of learning by the pupils. However, in the regional subconscious, ‘the professional’ and the ‘teacher-pupil relationship’ belong to two different emotional spheres. They fall within two different classifications in the cultural-symbolic constitution that Imden says ’embraces such things as classificatory schema, assumptions about how things are’ (as quoted in Cohn, 1983, p. 173).

The idea of the ‘professional’ is governed by schemas about relationships between adults encompassing the world of work, livelihood and worldly power. The farther one moves from the large urban centres, the more the idea of the ‘modern’, which the ‘professional’ is part of, takes on a performative tone. What this means is that the modern, and hence also the professional, is not ‘“a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, [it… is … instituted … through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts” (Butler 1999, 179 as cited Mari, 2023). This would include meeting expectations about updating one’s professional knowledge and rather literally a mechanical ticking of the affirmative box on the survey questionnaire.

These acts of the ‘professional’ sphere carry respect so that many teachers would have been motivated to complete the course. Theoretical knowledge, degrees and formal awards are held in high esteem throughout the region. I cannot doubt that a majority of those teachers would have made sincere efforts to gain the knowledge, or sufficiently so, in that course, to pass the test for the certificate. However, that effort is born of their self-image as modern educated professionals who are in touch with the latest developments in the world of education as provided by prestigious Western education, and of their respect for authority. It does not always connect mentally to activities in the classroom.

The teacher–pupil relationship within the classroom is grounded in a different psychological classification. It leans into ideas about adult–child relationships that have a more moral and emotional character. The teacher stands in a relationship of grave moral and intellectual authority vis-a-vis their pupils. Many South Asian languages contain expressions similar in meaning to the popular Sanskrit mantra comparing the ‘guru’ or the teacher to the three supreme deities of Hinduism – Bramha (the creator), Vishnu (the generator) and Mahesh (the destroyer). Education, when framed in traditional terms, carries the same ‘aura of deep moral seriousness’ that Clifford Geertz ascribed to all things religious in his discussion of human cultures (Geertz, 1973, p. 136). This notion is more responsive to a language of morality, care and nurturance of a young life than professional development. Even though the expression of this care may come across as a harsh disciplinarian dismissiveness to the onlooker, it can be more easily engaged by the semiotics of the ‘moral’ than of the ‘professional’.

As for teaching, the teacher’s job is to pass on the knowledge of the time-honoured ‘authorities’ in a given subject, in time-honoured ways. It is for the pupils to show respect to the authority of the teacher and of the knowledge by learning. If a lack in learning occurs then it is a lack in the pupil and not the teacher.

This is not to deny that there may have been other reasons too for the non-implementation of the training in the classroom. My Point here is simply to offer an alternative explanation (rather than mass dishonesty which may suggest itself more readily) for the contradiction between the large number of affirmative answers on the survey asking whether the new training was being used in the classroom and the large proportion of negative ones in the more detailed interviews.

It is also not my intention to say that none of the Western effort is ever adopted the way it is intended by the Western providers. No. In any sample, there would be a proportion of teachers who would apply the course exactly as intended but their motivation may come from Western theory or from indigenous child-friendly ethos of paternalism more familiar to them from their own cultural mores.

The data we were discussing may be suggesting a need for building new professional development practices by connecting them more explicitly to local worldviews. Preliminary conversational sessions exploring local ideas about the role of education and of the teacher may be useful too. ‘Co-creation’ of professional development frameworks in place of the dissemination and simple sharing of knowledge developed in the West is likely to be more effective.

In 20th century India, Gandhi was able to mobilise underlying notions of sacrifice and simple living in the indigenous culture. It gave him the means to turn a national movement that until then had been confined to the educated classes into a mass movement of the people. As politicians are apt to remind us repeatedly, any campaign for change is a campaign for the hearts as well as the minds of the recipients.

 

References

Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (2000) Post-colonial studies: the key concepts, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

Bhabha, H. K. (1994) ‘Introduction’ in The location of culture. London: Routledge.

Cohn, B. S. (1983) ‘Representing authority in British India’ in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 165–210.

Geertz, C. (1973) The interpretation of cultures, Kindle edition. New York, Basic Books.

Imden, R. (1976) ‘Cultural symbolic constitutions in ancient India’, mimeograph, pp. 6–8, as quoted in Cohn, B. S. (1983) ‘Representing authority in British India’ in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 173.

Mikkola, M. (2023) ‘Feminist perspectives on sex and gender’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2023 Edition in Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/feminism-gender/>.

Perloff, M. (1998) ‘Cultural liminality/aesthetic closure?: The “interstitial perspective” of Homi Bhabha’. [online] Available at: The “Interstitial Perspective” of Homi Bhabha (upenn.edu). (Accessed 10 December 2023)

Spivak, G.C., ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988, pp. 271–313.

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