It’s administration-bashing week here at SM. I just posted an unconscionably long comment (in the age of Twitter anyways…) at the AAA blog, where Bill Davis has recently and magnanimously agreed to re-publish his September Anthropology News article on “Free Journal Access as a Public Issue”. The thrust of the piece seems to be that, after extensive secret analysis, the AAA staff have confirmed that charging anthropologists $5564 a piece to publish in an AAA journal is a Really Bad Idea. Bang-up job boys, keep up the good work!
a) it’s called open access, not free access. Please stop.
b) who was it that suggested the AAA should move to an author pays model? Can you please say who suggested this, because it is a really bad idea. A point we apparently agree on.
c) can you please focus on the problem: the AAA faces a severe funding crisis. RE-EVALUATE EVERYTHING NOW. Stop trying to fund the AAA by selling journals and figure out how to fund the AAA. I wish I could be clearer. Maybe it is my English that is the problem?
In this occasional series, Illustrated Man, I will explore the intersection of anthropology and comic books, graphic novels, comic strips, animation, and other manner of popular drawn art.
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I was first exposed to the beauty of Studio Ghibli productions back in my dreadlocked college daze, years before I became the father of three girls. I’ve long treasured a secret joy found only in children’s programing and in my free time – back when I had free time – I’d randomly chose selections from the kid’s section of Hollywood Video (a commercial business that rented something called “VHS” — feature films stored on magnetic tape, I know it sounds weird).
This is how I discovered Hayao Miyazaki and the beloved classic, My Neighbor Totoro. A truly transcendent film, a gift to the future. I went on to become a huge Ghibli fan. I’ve seen twelve of their nineteen features (at least according to Wikipedia) and I am now eagerly anticipating the U.S. release of Tales of Earthsea, based on the fantasy series by anthropology scion Ursla K. Le Quin.
In the 1990s, as American popular culture began to take note of Japanese anime and manga Ghibli rose in profile as a preeminent studio. Eventually its stateside distribution would be picked up by Disney under the leadership of superfan, John Lasseter. This has been both a blessing and a curse. Unfortunately this has led to a redubbing of the treasured Totoro, which replaced the original cast with celebrity voices and changed the Japanese soundtrack to one Disney believed was more palatable to American ears. Prior to this Totoro was distributed in the U.S. by low-budget and cult favorite, Troma Entertainment. If at all possible, I encourage you to seek out the earlier Troma dub or, if you have an international DVD player, the Japanese language version with English subtitles. If the fiasco surrounding the Disney release of Jacques Perrin’s Oceans is any indication, it seems likely that Disney has taken creative liberties, intentionally mistranslated, or simply cut some aspects of Japanese culture to appease American audiences.
And yet, Disney produced the American release of Spirited Away, a film many consider to be Miyazaki’s masterpiece and which won an Oscar in 2003 for best animated feature, and, most recently, the early 2010 hit Ponyo. Disney has also sought to capitalize on Ghibli’s back catalog, producing original dubs of older features previously unreleased in the U.S. including the subject of this post, My Neighbors the Yamadas.
Right off the bat, American fans of Japanese popular culture will notice that My Neighbors the Yamadas does not look like an anime film. It has a completely different stylistic feel. In place of anime’s infantile, doe-like eyes and expressive hair on long and lean bodies we get something that appears to be watercolor over ink lines with the aesthetic character of a color comic strip in a Sunday paper.
The Yamadas is not directed by Miyazaki but Isao Takahata, a anime director famous in Japan but relatively less known to American audiences (most notably Roger Ebert championed Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, calling it one of the greatest anti-war movies of all time). With the Yamadas, Takahata has created a genuine sleeper hit that is beautiful, sophisticated, and hilarious.
Narratively My Neighbors the Yamadas is a collection of vignettes almost all of which depict events in everyday life from the point of view of different members of the Yamada family. The short sketches are indicative of the material’s origin as a comic strip. There is the father, Takashi, and mother Matsuko. Teenage son Noboru and grade school aged daughter, Nonoko. Shige is the grandmother and Pochi the family dog. As in the previous entry for Illustrated Man on American Splendor, my appreciation of Yamadas stems from its detailed portrayal of the ordinary. Like American Splendor these are “slice of life” sketches and while the gags don’t hit pay dirt every time they come quickly and there’s enough of them so something is going to stick.
The vignettes are strung together in thematic segments, often with ironic titles like “Domestic Goddess” for a series of stories about Matsuko. Her stories center around the labor of being a housewife: doing the laundry, shopping, changing light bulbs, doing the dishes, and getting the house ready for company to visit. “Marriage Yamada Style” features Takashi and Matsuko together, doing little things for one another, annoying each other, eating out, and fighting over the TV set. Like in a musical, realism can suddenly give way to fantasy sequences, like when their epic battle over the remote control turns into this dance number:
My Neighbors the Yamadas is made all the more unique by its use of haiku as a segue between vignettes. Irascible Shige visits an elderly friend in the hospital that seems more like a country club. But when she demands of her friend, “Just what are you in for?” the friend turns to tears and they walk away together in silence. A narrator’s voice reads “No sign of death’s approach in the cicadas’ voices.”
In another scene Noboru takes a phone call from a girl while Matsuko and Shige watch with great interest. After he says goodbye he bounds to his room and turns up the music loud, with shouts of ecstasy he dances on his bed. “The scent of plums on a mountain path. Suddenly dawn.”
Takashi stumbles home late from work and is completely exhausted, everyone is asleep save Matsuko who is watching TV. He demands dinner and without looking up from the TV she informs he can have beancake or a banana. Disgusted he spits out, “Who wants to come home after a hard day’s work to beancake.” And she gets up, “So the banana, then?” He struggles even to get a cigarette to his lips he’s so tired as she fetches his fruit and some tea before sitting down to watch her show. Absentmindedly, Takashi puts the banana in his mouth without peeling it. “Turn toward me. I’m lonely too. The autumn dusk.”
I queried my friend and anthropologist of Japan, Chris Nelson, about the significance of haiku in My Neighbors the Yamadas. To my mind it served to elevate the quotidian events of the Yamadas’ life into something beautiful, equating poetry with the chores of a housewife, the insecurities of a socially awkward teen, the trials of a small child lost in the mall. Additionally, I read it as marking the stories as particularly Japanese as if the haiku was doing some nationalist work too. The original Japanese movie trailers, which come packaged as special features on the Disney DVD make clear that the Yamadas were marketed not only as a typical family, but as a quintessentially Japanese family.
Though he had not yet seen the feature, Chris took a break from archival work in Okinawa to offer this thoughtful reply:
I don’t think that the use of poetry is really marked or unusual in this particular Japanese context. In fact, I was reading your message in a coffee shop after I had been turning the pages in the weekend paper (local, not national). There in the middle were two pages of poems submitted by readers. Most of them have the same kind of seasonal cues that you’ve mentioned. What the poem does is tie the particular event of the story to the season, but also to something more abstract. It works to tie something from daily life to the ineffable. If I were a poet and I was going to write a poem, I would try to do the same thing.
It speaks to connoisseurs of poetry, who get the allusions. It also challenges me to try to say something novel with all of these “already saids.” The Ghibli folks are extending this to cartoons, but there’s also something pleasantly familiar about that to most viewers, who have seen this in lots of conventional TV animations (many made in the visual style of this one). In the case of the animation, it also provides a kind of narrative closure for the story and links a modern animation to older forms of popular performance.
There is much in My Neighbors the Yamadas that an anthropological audience will find pleasantly familiar. The English dub, staring Jim Belushi and Molly Shannon as the dad and mom, is available on Netflix and is totally adorable. I watched it with my seven year olds and they thoroughly enjoyed it. The only thing I could compare it to are the early years of The Simpsons. Those first three seasons when The Simpsons was irreverent and quirky with a sweet, affectionate core that stands in contrast to the wacky, bawdy, and self-referential years that followed. So Yamadas is family friendly, but like the early Simpsons it depicts an imperfect family in a way that will amuse adults, not because of its references to popular culture but because its representation of domestic life are humorous and honest. The Yamada family bickers and can be petty, even passive aggressive, but their faults are all recognizable and realistic.
Like my father told me, “You can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your relatives.” Que sera sera, what will be will be.
There have been several recent reports of the closure of Rice University Press (here, here and here). RUP made a splash when it was resurrected as an “all-digital” print-on-demand, open access university press, the first of its kind and for many in the ailing university and scholarly publishing world, a beacon, or at least a canary in what is turning out to be a very large, very dark coal mine.
So if it’s closing down, it must have failed, right? There must be no money in digital publishing of scholarly works, right? This must be proof that the only way to make money is with strong intellectual property rights held by massive conglomerates, right? Wrong Wrong Wrong. RUP’s closing is a crystal clear case of something entirely different: bad university administration. The decision, despite the claims in the various articles, had absolutely nothing to do with the viability of the ideas, or the expertise of the staff, or the realities of the marketplace. Instead, it had everything to do with short-sighted, self-important, autocratic management of a university by administrators whose interests are hard to identify though clearly at odds with any possible goal of producing high quality scholarship. (And don’t get me started about the other recent decision to sell the student-run 50K watt radio station, KTRU, one of the best in the country. Sign the petition)
As a board member of Rice University Press, a former employee, and a participant observer in the whole experiment, I’ve had a worms-eye view the fiasco as it has unfolded. I won’t detail all the ways in which RUP is innovative, but for those in the business, i’ll just say: you should all be madly copying their ideas, because RUP had and has no real competitors. Do not be deterred by the shutdown: take advantage of the fact that one less rich university is out there spending $$ on something innovative. read more…
Grad student John Boldt had his laptop (which held his thesis) stolen. But he backed everything up, so no big deal, right? Well: His backup hard drive was stolen too, and now he may have to drop out.
Anthropologists reading this Gawker post might recall how Edmund Leach loosing all of his Kachin field notes was actually a good thing for the history of anthropology, but not everyone is Edmund Leach. Remember the importance not just of having regular backups of your work, but off-site backups as well!
My tool of choice is Dropbox, which automatically syncs your files to the cloud, as well as to any other computers you choose to sync with your account. Dropbox will even save previous versions of your files, allowing you to undo any mistakes you made in the past 30 days. (Or unlimited if you pay for it.) It is also a great way to share files on collaborative projects and one of the easiest ways to move files to your iPad if you have one.
But if you don’t trust the cloud, at least remember to regularly leave a copy of your hard drive at your parents house. Or, if you live with your parents, then leave a copy in a safe-deposit box, or with your advisor. Anywhere but the same place you live and work. If you use Mac OS, SuperDuper is my favorite tool for making a clone of your hard drive. Perhaps readers can suggest similar tools for Windows and Linux. (Dropbox works on all three.)
I’m a big advocate of anthropologists finding ways to connect with a larger audience, beyond those who read academic journals. (Sometimes I’m not even sure anthropologists read what other anthropologists write.) But then I see something like Guy Deutscher’s NY Times Magazine article “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” and I find myself wondering if the standards of journalism are just too different from those of academics? There is nothing wrong with Deutscher’s article, which seems to be an excerpt from a longer book he is writing, it is just that it was all too familiar. That’s because I’d read it all before in Lera Boroditsky’s Edge.org article “How does Language Shape the Way We Think?” as well as her more recent WSJ piece, “Lost in Translation.”
I’m not saying Guy Deutscher plagiarized Lera Boroditsky’s work. What I’m saying is that if this was an academic publication he would have been expected to cite her, but because it is journalism there is no such expectation, and that bugs the hell out of me. Even blog posts are expected to link to sources. Perhaps he does cite her in his book, but again, my point is about the standards of the NY Times. Now it is possible that these are simply common stories told by people in the field, but I find it strange that Boroditsky’s isn’t even mentioned in this article. After all, Newsweek’s article on the topic focused on her research.
Perhaps I’m wrong about this, and even journalists would feel something is amiss here, but I suspect not. It seems quite normal when one newspaper writes a story for other newspapers to go out and find their own reporters to give them the same story, sometimes even interviewing the same sources. In fact, I’ve even been a victim of this. An Indian TV news station went out and remade a short documentary film of ours, but since it was all new footage and interviews, there wasn’t much we could do about it. Nor am I certain that I would expect anything else from journalists if I weren’t an academic. Still, it drives me crazy whenever I see this kind of thing, and so I thought I’d vent. Am I way off base here? Or does this kind of thing bother you as well?
As anthropologists we research compact and ornate cultural practices that can scale up to something larger. Our informants usually aren’t aware of how their statements and practices reflect larger issues evident in broad social theories and histories—if they did than the world wouldn’t have anthropologists. They are often surprised to discover how meaningful their lives are upon reading our interpretations and manuscripts. That is, all subjects except those who have already done the literary and library work needed to contextualize their lives and passions within larger theoretical and historical trajectories. These informant-authors, in effect, know who they are–or at least who they would like to be. Anthropologists have studied text-makers–scientists, journalists, and governmental scribes–and their texts can be obliquely read as reflexive documents. Rarer still are anthropological accounts of living subjects constructing autobiographical, political, or social scientific texts. These well-published informants present a problem and opportunity that needs exploration.
It is wonderful to have hyper-literate informants, collaborators, and subjects who write and publish books, articles, and blogs and make films, documentaries, television programs, and online videos. In the history of anthropology, however, this is rarely the case and because of this paucity anthropologists are at pains to construct theories that are native to the informant. I do not envy the anthropologist who must contextualize their subjects’ interviews and practices in terms of theories and theorists that are not a part of the subject’s worldview. Using French literary and poststructural theory to describe nonliterate tribal practices seems profoundly unanthropological and yet such practices proliferate in academic journalis at an astounding rate. We need to interpret local actions and performances with the aid of indigenous theory somehow devised from observations and pronouncements of subjects. For instance, in The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia, Tom Boellstorff identifies a local indigenous theory of the self emerging from island life in Indonesia and uses it to guide the contextualization of his gay and lesbi informants. My job is certainly easier than Tom’s because self-publishing subjects provide so much more already contextualized information with which to construct a local theory of identity and community. My informant’s published social scientific work does much of the nuanced labor of theory building for me. The citations and name-drops in their texts make explicit the forbearers, influences, and heroes an anthropologist would archaeologically extract and artificially graft onto the informant in later chapters of extrapolation and upward scaling.
What are the rare opportunities and theoretical complexities associated with doing ethnographic investigation into subjects’ lives that are already reflexively situated in autobiographical texts?
The problems include the fact that the informant/authors offer autobiographical documents about their lives in richly theoretical prose that threatens to trump the work of the anthropologist. Without the reflexive published documents the anthropologist’s primary job is to proceed to first order contextualization–what was the cultural context of this practice? What is this practice like in a comparative sense to other proximal native practices? The opportunities for the anthropologist working with this citation-rich autobiographical literature is to take the level of extrapolation and abstraction one-step further. With bibliography dense self-authored accounts, the first tier theorizing is sufficiently complete–they tell you where they are coming from–leaving the second level of extrapolation open to answering questions like: within the field of all possible indigenous theories why did the subject gravitate towards these influences? How does this native epistemology compare to others in similar–or more daringly–dissimilar contexts? Anthropologists working without self-textualizing subjects surely can get to this second tier of extrapolation but it is more difficult and the conclusions made in that ethereal space are more tenuous.
All anthropologists work with edited documents. This includes interviews which are themselves performed edits of quickly self-truncated statements. These edits–oral, performative, or textual–makes for excellent granular units of data. But at the fieldwork stage, anthropologists need more data not less, we need less self-awareness and self-censorship and more roguish personalities, off-the-cuff actions, and improvisational performances. We need the backstage along with the front stage. Self-editing is a social fact of life but such highly edited texts cut out several important phases that would have been instructive if observed–the subject’s first impressions; selective shuffling, ordering, and prioritizing of issues; the gathering of supportive sources and examples–these are all in the data rich realm of practices and negotiations around which subjectivity and the social self are framed and performed. For example, a ghost writer is writing a book for one of my informants and I want to get the transcripts, edits, and feedback in this process to see how they are contextualized by themselves and the ghost writer for a perceived and corporately constituted audience. Finely edited books, combed over by agents, managers, editors, and colleagues do not furnish such raw data.
To what degree should we be critical about how these authors prefer to textually edit themselves into particular subjectivities? Contradicting or challenge author’s stated affiliations and origins is a practice in literary studies for revising the preferred automatic claims of dead authors but like stamping non-indigenous theory on indigenous data this too is quite unanthropological. The safe route is to step off from this first tier of reflexive theorizing into a higher level of abstraction. The more dangerous path is to read the authors cited by the informant and develop a still deeper sense of indigenous theory–this is going textually native–revealing where the informant glossed over contradictions and leaned on over-simplifications in arriving at their particular framing of the self. Using this critical textual reading of reflexive indigenous theory the jump into the second tier can be made along with the informant’s peers and mentors.
How to represent foreign speech? Many filmmakers are content to shoot against a painted backdrop, toss in a few bonjours, and call it France, while others go to great lengths to have characters look and speak as authentically as possible. There are no hard and fast rules, but it’s a tricky business—directors must balance the expectations of realism with ease of viewing. They want dialogue to be convincing, but they don’t want to alienate their audiences with accents or subtitles that aren’t essential to the story.
And if you enjoyed that you will probably also enjoy the discussion about “fake translations” which took place on the linguistic anthropology listserv. Over at the SLA blog (scroll down) Alexandre Enkerli took the time to embed all the videos from that discussion in a single post.
I’m not a visual anthropologist or film person, but I do love films that seem ‘ethnographic’ to me — and I’ve been watching a lot of them on Netflix Streaming while taking care of my kids. Two in particular struck me as sufficiently anthro to mention here — and both have to do with Monty Python.
The first, Monty Python: Almost The Truth: The Lawyer’s Cut, is an ambitious six episode documentary about Monty Python’s Flying Circus, beginning with the childhood of the members and ending with Meaning Of Life. The main reason to watch the film is, of course, to relive all of your favorite Monty Python moments and to learn more about what went on behind the scenes. If you, like me, have not watched Monty Python since you were a teen-ager, it’s a real treat to revisit half-remembered (and thoroughly memorized) sketches. The best part of the documentary is that it is not just about Python, but it is also done in the style of Python, complete with newsreaders in gravel pits, montages, flying cattle, and sudden cuts to television screens with images that then become the image on your television screen.
Beyond the nostalgia value, though, the topics — British sketch humor in the 1950s and 60s, Python’s place in counterculture as it developed and so forth — are of broader interest. And even more interesting are the interviews: most of the footage for the documentary is based on long, biographical interview with each Python.
Whatever they did to get those guys to open up worked — it is a fascinating glimpse into the lives of people who are, as Gary Fine would say, in the ‘late summer’ of their lives, reflecting back on something that was very very important to them. I’m sure many anthropologists have been in the position of interviewing people like this. The interviews are candid and fresh — neither distanced nor (despite the occasional anecdote that you can tell has been phoned in) the extremely surface-level ‘official candid’ story that you get sometimes from celebrities. That, I think, is what good interviewing looks like.
Their stories are interesting in and of themselves as well — these are happy, well-balanced people who have managed to become incredibly successful doing something they loved. Their different personalities are obvious — Cleese’s self-confident, genteel extroversion; Palin’s teddy-bear amiability; Gilliam’s narcissism-tinged ambition. But despite these differences you can’t help watch it and think: I wonder if there’s a lesson in here for me? I’d more than highly recommend it.
The second is Terry Jones: Medieval Lives, one of a series of miniseries he’s done. Those of us who remember back in the day when The Return of Martin Guerre was the shit will recognize it as not just history, but cultural history: engagingly told, featuring Gilliam-esque cutout animation from medieval books. Like much of Jones’s work, the narrative works by debunking common assumptions and is organized loosely around stereotypes: one episode on the minstrel, one on the kind. In fact these end up being about politics (the king), governance (the minstrel) and so forth. But they do a great job of disabusing people of the Victorian lens through which this period — and thus so much in the fantasy genre — is set. It is, as they say, ‘good for teaching’.
Hmmm… I haven’t really touched on Michael Palin’s travel documentaries (the dhow episode in Around The World In 80 Days a huge favorite of mine) but perhaps I’ll cover that in a future entry…. or maybe we could get him to guest blog?
Welcome to Around the Web, where Savage Minds maintains a green-ethos by recycling old links.
Mosques in America
Perhaps unsurpisingly opposition to the “Ground Zero mosque” is spawning general opposition to mosques in the United States as visibility is translating into hostility for Muslims in America. This after a Time magazine poll found that 43 percent of Americans hold unfavorable views of Muslims. Could the public debate in the U.S. be edging closer to the much more bitter conflict in Europe that has had France banning facial veils and Switzerland banning minarets?
Neurology supports anthropology on gender as learned behavior
In the new book, Delusions of Gender, brain researcher Cordelia Fine argues that while there may be slight variations in the brains of women and men the wiring is soft, not hard. “It is flexible, malleable and changeable.” Larry Summers be damned!
Language Log has an appreciation and links to reviews.
James Bond, cultural anthropologist
Movie buffs already know that the future of the James Bond franchise is uncertain. But Hollywood screenwriters are betting on his return with this potential screenplay where the British secret agent ventures into the Sahara to meet the Taureg people of uranium rich West Africa and find an American anthropologist who is seeking to help a former research subject who has been accused of a terrorist attack. Cultural anthropologist Michael Lieber, formerly of UCLA, is co-credited with the original concept.
Texting in Africa
In Africa as many as 30 percent of malaria drugs may be fake. A new program in Nigeria provides consumers with a code on the drug’s packaging that can be sent via text message to a hotline. A reply of ‘OK’ verifies the legitimacy of the medicine.
Race in the Gilded Age
An intriguing book reviewed by NPR explores the changing notions of race in the United States after the Civil War through the case of a man who lived a double life. As a Black man living in Brooklyn he went by James Todd, married a Black woman, and had a decent job as a physical laborer. As a White man he was Clarence King, a scientist and well connected socialite.
Chimp invents backscratcher
For many primatologists human culture differs from that of apes only by degree, not in kind. Researchers of a wild chimpanzee community in Uganda observed a male with partially paralyzed hands using a vine to scratch his back. The practice subsequently spread to seven, perfectly healthy chimps.
Recent archaeological finds
In the UK archaeologists from the universities of Manchester and York have dated a residential structure, associated with the archaeologically rich Star Carr site, to 10,500 years old. “This changes our ideas of the lives of the first settlers to move back into Britain after the end of the last ice age.”
In southeastern Georgia near the border with South Carolina, a significant discovery of a Confederate prison known as Camp Lawton. There were no above ground remains of the prison as Union troops burned it to the ground after capturing it, so its exact location has remained a mystery until now.
“Breastfeeding: It’s what your tits are for” Whip ‘em out and enjoy this great celebrity PSA:
You can contribute to Around the Web by emailing your links to me at mdthomps AT odu.edu
There is a lot of great anthropology published all over the world, but most anthropologists are, iirc, anglophone, and the biggest center of anglophone publishing is the American Anthropological Association. If you think about it, the AAA has actually been pretty good about opening up some its content: all AAA publications prior to 1965 are in the public domain, and all AAA publications after 2005 are governed by an author agreement that allows authors to deposit post-prints on their websites or other repositories.
What this means to Wiley-Blackwell is that they think no-one is going to subscribe to their database for the old stuff, and they assume few enough people will free their work such that open access competes with them for market share. For us, however, it means something slightly different: in terms of moving forward on OA issues in the AAA, the next step is to target those ‘missing 40 years’ from 1965 to 2005.
I’ve asked some people in AAA to see if they can hunt down the author agreement for those years (which I hope they’ll be able to do) to see if there’s a way to let people free posts from that period, but I wonder what else we can do to get at those 40 missing years. Any ideas?
Who is being marketed to in your neighborhood or in the communities you are studying? Enter a zip code and the Prizm market segmentation system returns five socio-economic types (out of a total of 67 possible types). What’s really fun are reading about all the different categories that the marketers have dreamt up. Here’s a flash video that provides a glimpse into how the data were generated and organized.
Here’s some PRIZM segments from my life’s geographies–
Where I currently live, Newport News, VA:
Blue Chip Blues — a comfortable lifestyle for ethnically-diverse, young, sprawling families with well-paying blue-collar jobs
Domestic Duos — a middle-class mix of mainly over-65 singles and married couples living in older suburban homes
New Beginnings — households tend to have the modest living standards typical of transient apartment dwellers
Park Bench Seniors — With modest educations and incomes, these residents maintain low-key, sedentary lifestyles. Theirs is one of the top-ranked segments for TV viewing, especially daytime soaps and game shows.
Suburban Sprawl — they hold decent jobs, own older homes and condos, and pursue conservative versions of the American Dream
The field site for my dissertation, Cherokee, NC:
Back Country Folks — residents tend to be poor, over 55 years old, and living in older, modest-sized homes and manufactured housing
Bedrock America — With modest educations, sprawling families, and service jobs, many of these residents struggle to make ends meet. One quarter live in mobile homes. One in three haven’t finished high school.
Blue Highways — the standout for lower-middle-class residents who live in isolated towns and farmsteads. Here, Boomer men like to hunt and fish; the women enjoy sewing and crafts, and everyone looks forward to going out to a country music concert
Crossroads Villagers — a classic rural lifestyle. Residents are high school-educated, with downscale incomes and modest housing; one-quarter live in mobile homes.
Shotguns and Pickups — scores near the top of all lifestyles for owning hunting rifles and pickup trucks. These Americans tend to be young, working-class couples with large families
Where my parents live, in a swanky part of Austin, TX:
American Dreams — In these multilingual neighborhoods–one in ten speaks a language other than English–middle-aged immigrants and their children live in upper-middle-class comfort.
Bohemian Mix — ethnically diverse, progressive mix of young singles, couples, and families ranging from students to professionals. In their funky row houses and apartments, Bohemian Mixers are the early adopters who are quick to check out the latest movie, nightclub, laptop, and microbrew.
Money & Brains — high incomes, advanced degrees, and sophisticated tastes to match their credentials. Many of these city dwellers are married couples with few children who live in fashionable homes on small, manicured lots.
Urban Achievers — the first stop for up-and-coming immigrants from Asia, South America, and Europe. These young singles, couples, and families are typically college-educated and ethnically diverse
Young Digerati — Affluent, highly educated, and ethnically mixed, Young Digerati communities are typically filled with trendy apartments and condos, fitness clubs and clothing boutiques, casual restaurants and all types of bars
I read about this first in the librarian blog/ webcomic, Shelf Check, a must read for anyone who harbors a secret crush on librarying. Posey writes that she saw it first in Lifehacker.
Next week as many as 50,000 people will inhabit Black Rock City, a temporary metropole constructed by volunteers for a week of personal expression and community celebration on the barren alkaline plains of a Nevada desert a half-days drive from Silicon Valley. This is Burning Man, a radically participatory event where a lot of people who labor in the digital creative industries work out collaborative utopias that make their way–the theory goes–into the social networking software and platforms they make and ask us to populate with our creative surplus, communal energy, and visually expressive humanity. The techno-culture historian Fred Turner states that Burning Man is a ‘sociotechnical commons’—the cultural infrastructure for the digital media industries of California. This is an attempt to document how and why Burning Man is a “proof of concept,” “beta test,” and practical experiment for the engineering of networked publics.
Here is the example. Burning Man influenced three projects to democratize media production initiated by Al Gore’s user-generated and citizen journalism cable network Current TV. Examples include Current’s Viewer Created Content (VC2) program, their social media website current.com, and TV Free Burning Man. Much like Burning Man, each project is an attempt to draw knowledge from the crowd and transform spectators into active producers. My observation is that Burning Man and Current’s emphasis on user-production business models is hemmed in by the looming pressures of capitalism.
Current is an example of what I call digital social entrepreneurship. It is a new media start-up and TV network deeply guided by both a mission and the market. At origin, so these firms go, the mission takes precedent over the market. As time goes by the market supersedes the mission. Current launched in 2005 with the mission to democratize media production and to provide a platform for others to discuss the future of democracy as well as view the cornucopia of voices that make democracy a dynamic guide for governance. Considering the tenuous state of democracies around the world, the consolidation of media systems by multinationals, the broadbanding of sectors of the globe, and the usability of graphic interfaces and professional grade video recorders the attempt to democratize media in 2005 was timely and prescient.
Current’s first idea about content producers was not to crowdsource content through the VC2 program. They didn’t intend to mine the producing audience for TV-caliber video submissions. Current originally planned to hire 20-30 digital correspondents to travel the world making content. A Current employee related to me how the programming executives, fresh from recent excursions to Burning Man in the early 2000s, used the open participatory model of Burning Man to argue against the exclusivity of the digital correspondent model by asking, “like Burning Man, why wouldn’t we let everybody in who wants to participate?” That spirit carried into the creation the VC2, a project to empower any amateur documentary producer to make content for television. This was the impetus behind the first user-generated television network.
From 2005-2008 Current’s website was www.current.tv. It was a space dedicated to VC2 producers to upload and critique short documentaries. In 2008, upper management decided that this was too elitist and they wanted more traffic so they put together a group of marketers, engineers, and creative executives to envision the new website, current.com. One of those creative executives, Justin Gunn, went into the first meeting to brainstorm current.com and
…hung up a map of Burning Man and I took an astronomy magazine and cut out pictures of stars and star clusters, and galaxies and galaxy clusters, and superclusters really beautiful Hubble imagery and positioned it around the Burning Man map and I looked at [my colleagues] and said, ‘that is what we are going to make.’ And they said,’ what is that?’ And I said, ‘OK, work with me here. We are going to start with the organizational principle of Burning Man, it is a very light, lean organization. I could be wrong here but there is something like 12 full-time employees around the year everything else is all volunteer labor. But they build the structure, they set the rules, they define the parameters and then they invite anyone, anyone to come and do whatever they want as long as they stay within the confines, abide by the rules, and follow the predetermined parameters—they can do whatever they want.’…You start with an organization principle, a framework, here is how this thing works, here is the lattice, but it is empty, we will do a few key things, and we will invite anybody in as long as they abide by the rules and play within the framework, they can build whatever they want. So the constellations and star clusters were meant to represent constellations of information.
Using celestially graphic metaphors for the digitally engaged public they hoped to network together Gunn sought to inspire his co-workers to make a system as open and empty–and as charged with possibility–as the desert of Black Rock before the gates of Burning Man swing wide.
Using their shared interests in participatory community, self expression, and technology as a platform for dialogue–as well as their proximal offices mere blocks from each other in the Silicon Valley outpost of SoMa in San Francisco– producers at Current and organizers of Burning Man began to scheme about a more dynamic relationship. TV Free Burning Man was a result. Combining professional and amateur field production with a televisual aesthetic of first person documentaries and tone poems, the for profit mass media television firm Current produced content live from the playa for four years, 2005-2008. Considering Burning Man’s imperative to avoid all forms of commercialization and the strict media permitting process to even use a still camera at Burning Man, TV Free Burning Man is a testament to the shared ideals and aesthetics of Current and Burning Man.
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I’ve attempted to link an outrageous event to important technological and economic digital systems used by billions of humans. The goal is to see how internet practices in virtual spaces are coconstituted by actual world practices in material spaces. Savage Mind writer Rex coolly said CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s goal with Facebook is to “scaffold” sociality–strap supportive beams to the human-to-human communication network that presently exists or might not exist without the structured arena. Rex has it right. Social media and social events, like the virtual and the actual, are coconstructed. And yet, something still trumps this transcendence of body-mind duality.
The commercial imperative looms over the users of corporately-made social media just as the end of the week at Black Rock City haunts the freedom-accustomed Burner. In a series of moves, Current has increasingly pulled back from their mission to democratize media production. In a tense economy and with venture capitalist money running thin, Current has moved to capitalize on its major asset, its cable license, through abandoning the VC2 program and relying on traditional professional programming.
Burning Man, on the other hand, remains a valiant, excessive, and privileged materialization of the ideal sociality coded into and by internet culture. Last year around this time I wrote about the emerging tourism industry in Black Rock City, But for now, the Black Rock Foundation does a tremendous job with a skeleton staff, grants art funds to hundreds of artists, and facilitates a relatively commercial free environment. As a non-profit with a seasonal ecstatic event, Burning Man has an easier job than Current of retaining its mission, a for-profit firm in a fiercely competitive TV market responsible for 24 hours of programming 365 days a year.
Openness, liberation, transparency, relativity, democracy, trust, non-privacy, and collaboration are the shared origin myths of the activists and planners of the internet and Burning Man. These ideals are coded into digital architecture in Silicon Valley and other areas around the Black Rock Desert and distributed for free use throughout the world. These digital social systems and event organizations are molded by their missions and driven by the necessity to optimize the growth of their organizations. Every ideal has a shelf life cut short usually by the profit necessity. The compromises to the mission that commercialization requires are the instances to monitor when adjudicating the sustainability of the social entrepreneurship model.
Many of you may be following the Marc Hauser case. If you aren’t: the NY Times has reported on it (here and here), the Chronicle of HIgher ed has published a leaked document from a former research assistant in Hauser’s case, Language Log, John Hawks and NeuroAnthropology have all posted some links, greg laden has a hilarious post about his perception that Hauser could make his new world monkeys consistently do surprising things. And so on.
I have a weak sense of the details, but I do know that accusations of fraud, regardless of whether fraud was committed, tend to have a range of effects on people involved, especially the administration of a university, the graduate students in a lab, and the fellow researchers in an accused’s field. One might think of this as Hauser’s trolley problem, a tool he’s fond of using himself in order to supposedly get at the basic biological modules or organs of morality. In this case, the person on the track, about to be flattened by a runaway trolley, is Hauser himself. One can imagine a number of scenarios: should one pull a lever to save Hauser? Should one push an unnamed (fat) graduate student or post-doc onto the track to save Hauser? Should one divert the trolley onto a track containing five other researchers who work on moral cognition, or leave it on the track towards Hauser to save those five? Should one derail the trolley and risk destroying a building (cognitive science at Harvard) that might contain sleeping researchers, etc. etc. etc.
As many journalists have noted, there is irony in the fact that Hauser’s forthcoming book is called Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad. But it’s more than irony, it’s a question of scale and temporality. Whatever evil is at stake here, it might have both a distant cause (evolution) and a proximate one (the institutional pressure to publish and the problem of being a star scientist), and neither Hauser nor anyone else seems able to mount a theory that would accommodate both. If there is a problem with Hauser’s style of research, it’s probably not that it is fraudulent. More likely, the problem is that his theories cannot explain the possibility of fraud arising as a result of the intense desire to prove that fraud has an evolutionary origin.
Celebrity conservative and goldbug, Glenn Beck, made an interesting argument this past Wednesday, August 18, on his Fox News show — since 2009, the most watched news program on television’s most watched news network. Beck contextualized this segment as part one in a three part series on Civil Rights in America.
Here the Hopewell earthworks with their numerological connection to the pyramids of Giza are being deployed as evidence that North America was a site of divine providence. The Bat Creek stone, originally found in Tennessee in 1889, is supposed to be evidence of pre-Columbian Jewish migration west from Phonecia across the Atlantic. Later in the segment a guest offers Tisquantum’s (Squanto) discovery of the Plymouth colonists as another example of divine providence.
The foil to Beck’s argument about divine providence, that America is special in the eyes of God and that the Founding Fathers were doing God’s work on Earth, is what he terms manifest destiny. For Beck manifest destiny is a perversion of divine providence. He states, “Manifest Destiny is, get out of my way, my way or the highway, because I’m on a mission from God. That is Manifest Destiny. That’s Woodrow Wilson. That’s Andrew Jackson. That’s not George Washington. It’s different.”
According to Beck, the purpose of this lecture is to reveal a history that “the Smithsonian, science, government, and commerce colluded to erase.” He continues, “The history that has been erased in our nation and, in particular, with the Native Americans, happened because it didn’t fit the story they created – manifest destiny. It only works if the Indians were savages. And they had to have savages for commerce and government to expand. The ancient artifacts prove otherwise. Why aren’t we looking into those?”
I think its unfortunate that archaeology, perhaps the most popular and most public face of anthropology, is so frequently hijacked by amateurs for nationalist and religious ends. The blog A Hot Cup of Joe just did a noteworthy post on this very topic. With the authority and authenticity that so many cultures ascribe to events in the past a material remainder can, like a fetish, carry great power. An actual physical object from the distant past that is undeniably real to the touch is proof that people were here before and the certainty of that physical reality is conveyed, like Frazer’s principle of magical contagion, onto ideologies making them just as real.
It’s doubly unfortunate that living American Indian people have to put up with this manipulation of the past to suit the ends of non-Indians. On August 13, Indian Country Today reported that the Cherokee Nation was filing suit against the state of Tennessee for extending state recognition to six groups that the Cherokees believe to be fraudulent. Included in this group of six are the “Central Band of Cherokee” which claim to be a Lost Tribe of Isreal.
Meanwhile on Glenn Beck fansites, his viewers did not give the above performance high marks. A common concern expressed on discussion boards was that the history lesson resonated too closely with Beck’s Mormon faith and they feared that the stigma attached to Mormonism would lead some to question their fandom of Beck, possibly leading to less enthusiasm for his general political agenda that they so highly value.
This case is a prime target for the Bad Archaeology blog and I hope they choose to write it up.
Via the PostSecret website, it is unclear whether the poster intentionally picked a photo of Sikhs or if this was unintentional irony. Not that the sentiment would have been any less offensive if the person wearing a turban was actually a Muslim. It certainly didn’t matter to the families of victims of post 9-11 hate crimes whether the victim was Muslim or not. I bring this up because William Dalrymple has an op-ed in the NY Times about the proposed Islamic center planned for lower Manhattan (for those living under a rock, see William Saletan’s piece in Slate for a good roundup of the issues surrounding the center):
The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion. Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn’t mean he’s in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors. Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith.
Dalrymple’s main point is that the Sufis behind the Cordoba Initiative are themselves “infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate[s]” in the eyes of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. We’ve been here before:
In 2006, the investigative reporter Jeff Stein concluded a series of interviews with senior US counterterrorism officials by asking the same simple question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia?” He was startled by the responses. “One’s in one location, another’s in another location,” said Congressman Terry Everett, a member of the House intelligence committee, before conceding: “No, to be honest with you, I don’t know.” When Stein asked Congressman Silvestre Reyes, chair of the House intelligence committee, whether al-Qaeda was Sunni or Shia, he answered: “Predominantly – probably Shia.”
Clearly the United States would be better off if our leaders, journalists, and citizens knew a little more about Islam. But there are also some lessons here about the semiotics of racism which I would like to think offer some insights beyond the 24 hour news cycle.
A Liverpool working-class accent will strike a Chicagoan primarily as being British, a Glaswegian as being English, an English southerner as being northern, an English northerner as being Liverpudlian, and a Liverpudlian as being working class. The closer we get to home, the more refined are our perceptions.
The above quote is taken from a discussion in Asif Agha’s masterful book Language and Social Relations. Agha’s focus here is on the limits of of performativity. By pointing out that the hearer’s own prior socialization provides an important context for the successful performance of identity, Agha sets the stage for one of the book’s central themes: that identity is not only mediated by discourse, but also requires a process of negotiation between speaker and hearer—and that this process of negotiation can be transformative, changing the possible range of identity positions available to both parties as well as society at large.
I quite like Agha’s argument, and in chapter after chapter he makes a convincing case for it. Particularly interesting is his discussion of kinship terms, in which he shows how a mother might refer to her in-laws using terms which, taken literally, would place her in the role of her own child vis-a-vis her relatives, but are nonetheless lexically differentiated from the terms a child might use. In doing so she claims her rights as the mother of the child without reducing herself to the status of a child.
While the discussion of a Liverpool working-class accent shows that Agha is aware of the limits to such performativity, I would have liked to see more discussion about situations where one party refuses to negotiate. Agha’s approach to limits implies that performativity might fail because of one party’s lack of socialization, but what about if one party has a will to ignorance? I think such willful ignorance is behind much American confusion with regard to Muslims, and so I’m not sure how much use historical, ethnographic, or journalistic accounts of the various divisions within Islam can help.
It seems to me that part of the problem derives from the very idea of a “just war.” As Judith Butler argues, such a concept requires the “division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war.” For some section of humanity to remain “ungrievable” requires a willful ignorance which refuses to engage in the kind of dialog which would allow for negotiated meanings to emerge. Thus, Islamophobia is in some ways a prerequisite for waging a global war on Terror, even as our leaders insist otherwise.
