Abstract
Jennifer Beste is interested in ‘the lives and longings of emerging adults’. Her study delves into student cultures at two mid-western Catholic colleges in the United States. The focus is on campus party norms, particularly those relating to ‘hookups’, casual sexual contact between students that is often fuelled by alcohol and intensified by social media activity before and after the parties in question.
While the book gives only cursory attention to wider theoretical discussion around the use of social anthropological methods within Christian ethics (p. 11), the project as a whole represents a deepening alliance between the disciplines. In my own context of the University of Cambridge, these links have been advanced by figures such as Michael Banner, Joel Robbins and James Laidlaw. I was first introduced to the growing number of scholars exploring these interdisciplinary borderlands via Laidlaw’s monograph The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2014). For moral philosophers and Christian ethicists engaging in a ‘turn to anthropo-logy’, the aim has been to bring ethics back to the ‘everyday’. What is sought is a focus on embedded description and re-description as a way of breaking free of overly abstract discussions of utility, duty or virtue that risk becoming untethered from the realities of concrete decision-making norms, values and commitments in specific cultural contexts.
Jennifer Beste’s argument is built on data derived from 126 student ‘ethnographers’ who formed the undergraduate cohorts enrolled in courses she taught on sexual ethics over a two-year period. The research methodology is ambitious and potentially fraught: the author recruited her own students to become ‘ethnographers’. They observed the party cultures in which they were embedded, reporting what they saw, thought and felt, and structured their reflections in ways that would be intelligible to those of us on the ‘outside’. While efforts were made to combat group-think and encourage students to provide accurate and honest descriptions (despite their ethnographic reports being academically assessed within the context of Catholic colleges), the success of these efforts cannot be known with certainty. In addition, the sample size is relatively small and most of the students, both observers and observed, were white heterosexuals from middle-income households who had some exposure to Christianity in their upbringing (p. 306).
The author anticipates potential criticisms and goes to significant lengths to defend the methodology against detractors, both in the introductory section and in the appendix. Beste seeks to turn potential methodological pitfalls into advantages. By sacrificing quantitative breadth, an opportunity for rich qualitative depth is optimised. Additionally, by recruiting her own students as co-researchers, Beste formed an ethnographic community who could be encouraged toward mutual accountability. They are described and re-described as they go about their observations. Just as Beste is alert to the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology, so her students became increasingly aware of their own biases and the ways in which their presence as researchers at various parties may have influenced what was observed. As such, the book is as much a narrative about a particular researcher engaging in a collaborative research project with students as it is about ‘hookup culture’ itself.
Beste is confident that the potentially distortive effects of the power differential between her and the student ‘ethnographers’ could be neutralised through mutual acknowledgement and clear communication regarding the criteria for assessment. She also accounts for the ways research questions were formed and data coded, emphasising the fact that there was never an ambition to make generalisable claims as a result of the research. Rather, the aims are relatively modest. Beste seeks to offer a snapshot of a particular party culture, to record how student ‘ethnographers’ explain and make moral sense of what they see, and to make a few comparisons between what is observed and the wider academic literature. Readers are left to draw their own conclusions as to how this youth culture may compare with others and the book contribute to the study of ethics in their own contexts.
The first of the book’s three parts focuses on the content of student observations. The second represents a significant shift in emphasis, as Beste reports on student reactions when they are asked to engage with a Christian vision of human fulfilment, specifically as it appears in Johann Baptist Metz’s Poverty of Spirit (Paulist Press, 1998). Drawing on the insights of the preceding parts, the third considers the ways in which campus party culture might be ‘repaired’, or at the very least its most damaging aspects curtailed, particularly those pertaining to the widespread and disturbingly underreported phenomenon of sexual assault.
Part I is full of direct quotes from students as Beste builds a picture of the ‘life cycle’ of the average campus party. It relays student reflections as to the decisions being made in these contexts, the power dynamics involved and considerations as to the possible motivations driving campus party cultures. For some but by no means all students, a key aspect of social life involves late-night gatherings characterised by the normalisation of excessive alcohol consumption and the expectation that some kind of sex-act will take place. The parties are mimetically-charged contexts into which impressionable and anxious students place themselves for a kind of sexual rite of passage. Some students described an uneasy alliance between alpha males and the most desirable females in these contexts: the female’s power to reject and inflict social shame is noted, but so is the risk of an unresponsive female being labelled ‘frigid’. More often than not, this resolves in the male’s favour after the influence of alcohol becomes a significant factor. Also described were various hierarchies among the students based on ethnicity and sporting prowess, as well as various strategies of dissent and survival by sexual and ethnic minorities. Many students observed a pressure on certain males to maximise the number of their sexual partners and stigma upon females who do the same. The frenzied sharing of party photos and related messages on social media platforms was noted by a number of students as being integral to the way students engaged with each other before, during and after the parties in question. On reading these illuminating snapshots of student experience, I wondered if more could have been said as to how they might relate to current research into the psycho-social developmental stages of late adolescents, as well as quantitative research into the sex lives and attitudes of American students based on gender, income and race.
The reflections by the student ‘ethnographers’ pointed to the fact that not only were many left feeling unfulfilled by hookup party culture, but they were also uncomfortable with the ways it reinforced consumer approaches to bodies and sexuality, and reproduced social stratifications and inequalities. In this vein, some of the students understood hookup culture as a manifestation of wider American cultural norms, including the capitalistic commodification of bodies, enduring patriarchal power relations, racial inequality and heteronormativity. In Part II, Beste brings the work of Johann Baptist Metz to the fore as a way of helping her students (and readers) to critique these cultural dynamics and to engage with alternative visions of human fulfilment. Here the emphasis shifts: no longer is the focus on ethnographic observations at particular parties, but on Beste’s pedagogical approach and the resources given to her students to make sense of their observations.
According to the author, many students found Metz to provide a workable framework to make sense of their own dis-ease with hookup cultures. This may be true, but I wondered whether the exclusive focus on Metz unduly skewed and narrowed the student ethnographers’ reflections. At one point, inspired by Metz, Beste reports on asking students to undertake an exercise in which they are asked to imagine what ‘Jesus . . . as a twenty-year-old African American’ might say and do at a campus party (p. 9). It is inevitable that looking through such a lens will render the negatives of the party culture with such strength as to overwhelm alternative and perhaps more balanced perspectives. In this vein, the students’ reflections—and Beste’s subsequent analysis—might have been richer if, alongside Metz’s notion of human fulfilment in the embrace of ‘poverty of spirit’, they had considered counter notions of human fulfilment in Nietzsche, liberal and libertine figures, and feminist authors, for instance. Behind this criticism is a deeper concern pertaining to the relative paucity of explicit reflection in the study regarding the movement between ethnographic description and the normative moral claims being made by Metz, student ethnographers, and Beste herself.
In Part III Beste offers a series of hard-hitting observations stemming from what her ethnographers had revealed about the problem of sexual assault and rape on campus. Once again, there is an effort to convey her students’ experiences in their own words and to take seriously their suggestions for reform, both at an institutional level and within the hookup culture itself. Beste reports on her attempts to engage students in thinking about sexual ethics beyond thin notions of consent, and shares with her readers students’ reactions to the notions of ‘equal mutual sex’ and ‘positive consent’. Also included are recollections of conversation with students as to the ways in which a culture infused with pornographic material ‘ethicizes equality but eroticizes inequality’ (p. 234). Here some of the challenges of leading a community of student ethnographers come to the fore, particularly as Beste recounts an incident in which a student disclosed to her committing a rape for which they had not confessed or faced any kind of sanction (p. 264). Engaging with such situations seems to be the cost of an embedded methodology for ethicists such as Beste, posing the question of how an ethnographer should best respond to unethical and criminal conduct in cultures under observation.
The burden of Part III is to give attention to some of the negative effects of hookup culture and to offer some suggestions for amelioration. Just as it may be a context for the expression of unfettered sexual freedom, hookup culture is also associated with trauma, exploitation and the ruination of academic potential. As the students themselves report, law enforcement is only one aspect of what is at stake here: issues of enduring shame, peer pressure, victim blaming, and secondary victimisation all play a role. Beste acknow-ledges that the challenge for educational institutions manifests in the need to establish ever more sophisticated policies to adjudicate claim and counter-claim, often in situations where one student’s word is pitted against another’s and an unregulated ‘trial-by-social-media’ has already occurred. There is a capacity for real tragedy to unfold as particular lives are caught up in crude institutional responses that need to balance a demand for due process, so protecting the presumption of innocence, and provision of pastoral carers who will genuinely believe accusers and offer credible mental health and legal support.
After listening to her students’ experiences and facilitating their reflections, Beste is of the view that Christian ethics should respond to college hookup culture with a commitment to ‘freeing one another from dominant sexual, social norms’ (p. 301). What she provides is an immersive study demonstrating some of both the potential and the limitations of placing ethnographic methodologies in the service of Christian ethics. Beste moves beyond mere description to issue a call for action: ethnographic encounter fuels a normative ethical claim. Beste holds before us an alternative vision of human fulfilment than that enacted in hookup cultures. Inspired by Metz and her students’ reflections, she calls for institutional responses based on positive consent and proactive efforts to counter victim blaming. This is a worthwhile book for Christian ethicists who are keen to follow Beste in drawing upon the methods of social anthropology, as well as all who work to care for emerging adults.