I promise I won’t do this very often, but I do quickly want to advertise two things I’m working on at the moment. First, over at Digital Genres I’ve got my first post on semiotic technologies in a series which is meant to be (and may even turn out to be!) the first major thing I’ve thought since I finished my dissertation and will eventually be the ‘theoretical’ part of my next research project on massively multiplayer video games.

Speaking of that dissertation—I’m defending in a week! I’ve made a copy of the precis available on my website if you’re wondering what I do when I do anthropology instead of blog about it. After I defend and deposit, I’ll post the diss online as well.

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I’m sort of surprised it’s taken SM this long to have a full-on rant about the shortcomings of sociobiology/ evolutionary psychology/ evolutionary biology—perhaps I’m the only person who is habitually irritated by this field, or perhaps we are all so irritated by it that we’d rather just not go there. At any rate a couple of different people have pointed out a recent interview with Mark Pagel. I have never read anything he is written, and a quick look at his homepage indicates that he is a fairly prominent scientist. Nonetheless, the interview drove me nuts. Here’s why.

Obviously I have nothing against biology or evolution, and in fact I’ve argued on SM in the past for the value of a ‘four field’ approach. So I am not one of those dreaded ‘cultural studies postmodernists’ boogiemen that people habitually invoke to make humanists look bad. I don’t have an issue with evolutionary biology in principle, but I do have an issue with it when the analytic models it uses to make sense of human behavior are so blunt.

Let’s do a little ‘anthro 101’ on the assumptions about ‘human nature’ in this interview. For instance, when Pagel claims that “we really aren’t very different from other animals” because, like them, we “engage in warfare” and “forage for food.” We are, obviously animals, and I have no idea how one might want to define ‘warfare’ or what counts as ‘warfare’ in other species but it should only take a second to realize that the rest of this post could be about taking that assertion apart into very small pieces. Equally: ‘forage for food’? Has that been how human communities have supplied themselves with food for the past couple thousand years? Foraging happens, of course. But then again so does prancing around in antlers—and while we’re like deer in that respect, I wouldn’t say that this is defining feature of humans.

Ditto with “We choose mates on the basis of characteristics that we think will be related to our success in reproducing”: If by ‘mate’ you mean ‘marriage’ then in fact you might not be the one doing the choosing if your family has anything to say about it (imagine you are a woman in a culture where women lack agency). And of course the range of marriageable people is defined by culturally specific notions which animals really lack (baboons do not have to marry their cross-cousins). If by ‘mate’ you mean ‘sex’ then ‘choice’ implies a little more rationality than goes into the decision sometimes. If by ‘choose mates on the basis of their sucess in reproducing’ you mean ‘get laid’ then yes, you hit on the person who you think will go home with you (unless, of course, you have a biologically innate ‘fear of strangers’). Like I said, I don’t doubt that we’re animals. But the point is this: the more choices about ‘mates’ matter in terms of ‘resources’ (stable social relationships which channel money, power, calories, etc.) the more likely they are to be regulated by the ways of being human that are the least like the behavior of other animals.

I’m not even going to go into the claim that there is ‘more cultural diversity’ in the tropics because there is ‘more biomass’ and hence more ‘resources.’ As someone who studies a country widely touted as being the most culturally diverse place on the planet (Papua New Guinea), I assure you that it’s not the biomass that makes people speak 700 different languages. And for the record, just because there’s a lot of biomass does not mean it’s all edible.

But what I find most annoying about the interview is the implicit model of ‘cultural groups’ or ‘human groups’ that Pagel uses. Here we have the familiar, but mistaken, idea that ‘cultures’ are internally homogenous and brightly bounded. Basically he appears to use the term ‘culture’ as synonymous with ‘nation state.’ Given the way this approach treats ‘cultures’ as discrete objects, it’s no wonder Pagel can imagine that “Human cultural groups have behaved as if they were different species.” And (of course) each of these externally bounded internally homogenous groups speaks exactly one language. So you can count up cultural diversity by counting the number of languages, right?

Wrong. Ernest Nagel’s analysis of the logic of structure functionalism (in, iirc, The Structure of Science) points out that it is really, really hard to draw clear lines between ‘societies’ and their environment in the same way you can between an organism and its environment. Trying to define the ‘health’ (or ‘goal state’) of a ‘human group’ that it might be trying to improve or at least keep in equilibrium is also difficult. Referring, as Pagel does, to “human groups” such as “Britain, America, and China” is cripplingly problematic. What is ‘China’ again? Does it include Xinjiang? Tibet? People who are ethnically Han? But then what about China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic minorities (‘Han,’ like ‘white’ to most Americans, isn’t a ‘culture’ it’s ‘what normal people are’)? So then is the nation state of China one group or many? If you ‘one’ then you may have a ‘group’ but not a ‘cultural’ one. And at any rate how long has it been since Michael Mann pointed out that human being are social, not societal and that while networks of power might be empirically distinguishable, they certainly aren’t coterminous with the borders of a polity. Twenty years? And how long has it been since the Boasians demonstrated that culture traits flow across political, social, and economic boundaries so fluidly that I can read newspapers “printed in characters invented by ancient Semites on material invented in China by a process invented in Germany” and “thank a Hebrew deity in an Indo-European language” that I am 100% American? A century or so?

And speaking of 100% ‘American’, did any of the Canadians who read that last paragraph notice that according to Pagel they’re in the same ‘cultural group’ as citizens of the United States?

I don’t take issue with the project of understanding human evolution as a whole, but I do take issue with attempts to explain human behavior that don’t actually take into account what we know about it. I’m sure that if gave an interview in Discover Magazine about the genetic constitution of plants (one of Pagel’s specialities) based on my impressions of the flora in my fieldsite in Papua New Guinea, Pagel would be horrified at my pretensions to scientific expertise. Well you know what? The feeling is mutual. Interviews like Pagel’s (and I’m not making any claims about his work, because I haven’t read it) run roughshod over decades of research by social science and rely instead on their common-sense notions how humans behave. This is simply not good enough to build a rigorous theory of anything on.

If you’re interested in the relevance of the Boasian theories of cultural boundaries today, I highly reccomend Ira Bashkow’s excellent article A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries and the other papers in that issue of American Anthropologist. If you’d like a global history of human society with a more nuanced, authoritative, and complete account of the growth of human interconnection across the past 40,000 years, I’d suggest The Human Web.

Update: Having browsed quickly through some of Pagel’s work it’s clear to me that his published stuff is much more nuanced than this interview. Nonetheless, I wish he were more lucid when speaking to a popular audience.

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One of my informants emailed me this magazine cover. I haven’t read the story, but I wager I know what it says already. Though the implication that the anthropologists are “hunting” pygmies (small start-ups) is either chillingly apposite, or totally baffling… I’m offering a “Kiss Me, I’m a Pygmy Hunter” T-shirt to the best “separated at birth” suggestion for this guy…

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I just heard Aihwa Ong talk at a conference here in Taiwan on transnationalism. She was drawing on her MacArthur funded research into “how neoliberal forms are taken up in the transformation of East Asian cities.” These ideas are presumably also discussed in her contribution to a new edited volume: Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems.

Her talk started off in a rather funny manner. Her microphone didn’t work and nobody could hear her, but the Taiwanese audience was too politely reverential to tell her. They tried rigging up a microphone stand, which didn’t work. Then they decided to send a woman on stage with a chair to sit next to Dr. Ong and hold a microphone for her. It was at this point that she began to realize that nobody could hear her, and she took up the microphone in her own hand, clearly freaked out by the idea of having someone sitting there holding it for her.

Even with the microphone, however, Aihwa Ong is still difficult to understand. I don’t believe that academic discourse need always be understandable to the non-initiated, but I do believe scholars should make an effort in that direction. Academic jargon and neologisms can be useful short-cuts for complex ideas, but they can also short-circuit the analytical process by allowing one to avoid critically reexamining certain key assumptions. Fortunately, once she moved from theory to the specifics of her research, her main argument became much more comprehensible.

At its core, Ong is applying the analytical techniques of governmentality to the discourse of management “gurus” in Shanghai and Singapore. That is to say, she is looking at how American management companies and experts attempt to reengineer the behavior of white collar workers in order to better align them with the needs of global capital. Central to this is the ideology of neoliberalism, which Ong defines as the promotion of self-governing rationality and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

What particularly interested me was the comparison between Shanghai and Singapore. In China the state remains officially critical of neoliberal ideology, even as it encourages the forces of neoliberalism, while Singapore openly embraces neoliberalism. In particular, the Chinese state counters neoliberalism with nationalism, while Singapore, Ong argues, is moving away from the ethnic state. Ong discussed how Singapore is actively encouraging expatriates and global talent, throwing out the “Asian values” rhetoric of the 90s.

In discussing the rhetoric of foreign management gurus in Shanghai, Ong said that any behavior which deviated from the standards of American corporate culture was treated as irrational, and blamed on “Chinese culture.” Workers were seen as lacking motivation, not identifying with the company, and lacking the communication and self-presentation skills necessary to function in a global economy. At the same time, Ong also made it clear that the workers resented the different pay scales awarded to foreign and local workers, and explained that many workers saw corporate work as a way of gaining the necessary knowledge to go into business for themselves, with no long term plans to remain within the corporation.

Ong seemed to take the ideological rhetoric of neoliberalism at face value. As her own account seems to make clear, these management gurus are not actually interested in producing rational self-motivated individuals. They want a disciplined white-collar work force. These workers “irrationality” is in fact rational and entrepreneurial. They would rather go into business for themselves than be treated as second class workers in the corporate hierarchy. Just as the Bush administration selectively invokes neoliberal ideology to promote its own agenda, quietly abandoning neoliberal principles whenever it suites them, so too do Shanghai’s management gurus seem to invoke neoliberal values in order to produce team-players willing to subordinate individual gain to corporate interests. It is when they act rationally in their own self-interest that they are somehow being “Chinese.”

Despite my reservations, it was a thought provoking talk, and I will definitely be checking out Aihwa Ong’s new book. Hopefully I might have a chance to meet her before she leaves the country, and maybe even discuss this further.

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That’s the suggestion of Doughnut Boy Andy in response to an e-mail about “plans to open an ‘African Village’ within the zoo of Augsburg, Germany.” Prometheus 6 has the full English version of the recently circulated e-mail. Ethno::log covered the story as well.

The only thing I’d like to add to all of this is a recommendation that people see the very fine film “Bontoc Eulogy” by Filipino-American filmmaker Marlon Fuentes. It is wonderfully rye and witty fake documentary which uses real footage from the 1904 World Fair in St. Louis to construct a fictional narrative in which the filmmaker claims his own grandfather was one of the “natives” on display. If your school doesn’t already own a copy they should buy one!

UPDATE: Links to further discussion.

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It is interesting to note that biographies of Leslie White and Julian Steward have both recently appeared. William Peace’s Leslie White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology appeared just a bit ago, and now I see that Scences from the High Desert: Julian Steward’s Life and Theory is also out. For some reason—I’m not sure how—David Price has become the fairy godfather of SM, so readers might be interested in his review of Peace’s book (AnthroSource will download a 44 page PDF of the entire book review section, not just this review. While you’re there, why not check out Glenn Banks’s review of Saleem Ali’s book, or Peter Gow’s take on In Amazonia?).

I haven’t gotten my mits on the Julian Steward bio yet, but having written a pretty meaty research paper on the relation between evolutionary anthropology and political leftism in Michagan and Columbia in the 1950s, it’s clear to me that Peace’s book is scurpulously well researched—White is not an easy person to get sources on, and the level of detail that Peace provides is really to be congratulated. On the other hand, one worries whether White was really worth the trouble—and keep in mind I say that as his intellectual grandson! His later career was really quite underwhelming considering his earlier work.

Additionally, both Price and Peace argue that authors such as Handler and Stocking whitewash White’s career as a leftist, a charge that I think is a bit unfair. It is certainly true that Handler and Stocking are not as interested in White’s leftism as Price and Peace—who could be?—and so it is not in the center of their analysis. This is a fair point. At the same time, I feel Price and Peace’s interest in leftist anthropologists (and, in Price’s case, their persecution) lead them to jump on White’s leftism a bit too strongly. My feel for White, based on reading his work and interviewing people who knew him, is that his contrarian attitude and need to create controversy might explain his dalliance with Communism, rather than the other way around. I for one would be interested in a more nuanced analysis of his personality and personal history to explain the complex interlinkages between his political commitment on the one hand and his own complex and often troubles personal history rather than focusing on the ways he can be enlisted in a history of leftist anthropologists and government surveillance. Although, to be sure, that is obviously part of the story.

Steward, on the other hand, was a much austere personality. I was struck in the course of my research on him at how central to the discipline he was today both institutionally (in his numerous administrative appointment) and theoretically—here was a student of Kroeber and Lowie with impeccable Boasian credentials who returned to evolution and a kind of macro-theory that was alien to Boas. I’m not particularly impressed with the large group studies on modernization, or Steward’s musings on the subject, but it is worth noting that his brief stay at Columbia in the late 1940s and early 1950s produced more block-buster anthropologists than White’s entire teaching career. I mean, this is the guy who midwived Stanley Diamond, Sydney Mintz, Eric Wolf, and Robert Murphy—none of whom were buttoned-up Christian Scientists (depending on how you stretch you definitions, you could include Sahlins (student of Fried) and Harris (student of Wagley) to this list). Of course Steward can’t take credit for the incredibly rich moment of thought that that period was known for (and in fact he was in some cases downright unhelpful to female anthropologists like Eleanor Leacock despite her superb work), but all in all he seems to be articulated with anthropology’s timeline and institutions in a way that White wasn’t. It makes me very eager indeed to read Kerns’s book. Of course, there isn’t a copy on my island

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Here’s an interesting article in Canadian news today about the Kingston (I can only assume they’re referring to Kingston, Ontario) police force:

“Kingston’s police chief apologized to the city’s black community Thursday after a controversial study found officers are more likely to stop black people than whites.”

The police chief went on to specify that the officers themselves had no reason to apologise because:

“What we’re doing wrong if we’re doing anything wrong is systemic and that’s my problem.”

I think it’s great that the existence of a problem of racial profiling is being addressed. However, I find it fascinating that the chief of police is willing to carry the blame for a long tradition of systemic and institutionalised racism in Canada (although I realise that this is probably not his intention). As an individual and an authority figure, he can certainly exert some influence on the people under his command, while he is in command.

The problem, though, is that racial profiling is a symptom of a wider societal problem that reaches far beyond the police force. The roots of this problem are tightly intertwined with educational and political problems that also need to be examined. That being said, I’m sceptical about the exercise of looking at police practices in isolation from the social and cultural context within which they are located.

But, hey, it’s a start and I sure can’t complain about the issue being given some recognition and acknowledgement; enough so that an actual scientific study was conducted with the cooperation of the police force. I’m looking forward to hearing about what will be done at a concrete level once the report is fully analysed.

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In two recent posts I referenced the use of life expectancy statistics by economist Amartya Sen to highlight social inequality. So I feel compelled to report on a new paper which is critical of another set of data used by Sen: the gender gap in birth rates.

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the authors of Freakonomics, have an article in Slate on Emily Oster’s work (PDF) which establishes a link between hepatitis B and birth gender.

This is an important link because it goes a long way towards explaining the 100 million “missing women” Amartya Sen had noticed when examining statistics on childbirth in Asia. In fact, it seems to account for about half of them; although primarily in China, not India. Basically, pregnant women with hepatitis B are much less likely to give birth to boys than the general population. Hepatitis B can account for “roughly 75 percent of the missing women in China,” but “less than 20 percent of the boy-girl gap” in India.

The article is also worth reading for a nice coda regarding Emily Oster’s contribution to the study of child language acquisition.

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My guess is that this is going to be a color piece on NPR in the next month or so: Hufu—“The Healthy Human Flesh Alternative”. ‘Human’ and ‘Tofu’—get it? As the FAQ puts it, “HufuTM was originally conceived of as a product for students of anthropology hungry for the experience of cannibalism but deterred by the legal and logistical obstacles.” And yes, there are recipes.

Most of the population of Papua New Guinea lives in the highlands. People in the highlands are as disgusted by cannibalism as the average American. Most Papua New Guinean people did not eat people before contact. The practice has been more or less obsolete for decades, in some cases a century or more. So this product furthers the unfair and demeaning exoticization of Papua New Guineans (to name just the area of my specialty). Let’s get that out of the way right there.

That being said, this idea is so bizarre and surrealistic I find it utterly fascinating—I mean if this isn’t a complexly overdetermined piece of material culture, what is? However, I can only give so many props to the guys who started it—it’s clearly derivative of the toinfant.

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In the Columbia Journalism Review Daily, Brian Montopoli investigates Bill O’Reilly’s ongoing crusade against University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill. It turns out that Ward Churchill has been mentioned by O’Reilly on no less than 25 separate occasions.

Maybe we can get O’Reilly to give Savage Minds that kind of publicity? Then when I’m asked what my “greatest weakness” is in a job interview I can quote Bill O’Reilly: “Right wing radio hosts say I’m a ‘terrorist weasel’, but I think that this is really one of my strengths.”

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You know those people who justify their lifestyle and/or ideology by saying “Well, in some cultures, this is considered normal”? Or the people who decontextualise arbitrary elements of various “exotic” cultures to illustrate what they perceive to be human universals? I see some of this in certain counter-cultural social circles such as neo-pagan groups, polyamorists, attachment parenting advocates and so forth. (Just so that we understand each other, here, I’m not putting any of these groups down or accusing their members of ignorance. In fact, I’m part of at least one of these counter-cultures).

The comments that I read in messages on various virtual forums or that I hear in various get-togethers often lead me to be the pesky anthropologist, raining on every body’s parade. For instance, whenever I hear polyamorists proudly claim that this lifestyle is normal and honourable because people around the world have been practicing polyamory since the beginning of time, I wince and then . . . rain on their parade. I feel that I have to mention to them that the term polyamory, just like the terms homosexual, bisexual and so forth, are historically and culturally situated and cannot be projected across time and space. Not in those words, of course.

On the other hand, I also get the “oh, but polyamory is different from polygamy” with the elaboration that the latter is disgusting and inherently degrading to women (because people often confuse “polygamy” with “polygyny”). Again, I have to intervene with my anthropological explanations.

Often, people are glad to be better informed. Other times, they are angry because I just went and messed with their scheme of things, which does tend to get people riled up. So I ask myself why I keep bothering.

Part of that self-questioning leads me to ask myself if I am much different from them. After all, anthropological study is what opened my eyes to alternate possibilities for my own life. My decision to adopt several elements of attachment parenting (i.e. nurse my son beyond the typical 6 months, co-sleep, carry him for many hours of the day when he was a baby) was largely based on reading ethnographies containing information on cross-cultural child-rearing practices.

However, unlike the above-mentioned generalisers (again, I’m not putting them down . . . some of them are my friends), I put the practices in which I am interested in context. If I adopted certain parenting practices that appealed to me in spite of them going against the mainstream North American grain, I did it with the understanding of why mainstream practices made sense to most of the people around me. This allowed me to be able to see where they were coming from in their arguments and to counter the arguments with my own. It also allowed me to be prepared for the somewhat marginal position that comes with adhering to alternate life choices.

Folk anthropologists, on the other hand, are often unable to make that link that is created by cultural relativity. They tend to take the facts out of context and become unable to back-up the practices that they are defending against the scrutiny of the cultural mainstream. They are therefore left with meaningless statements such as “In some cultures . . .” They also sometimes fail to see the cultural context that exists in their own society and that leads to people around them being so adamantly opposed to their way of life. Finally, they face emotional distress when faced with scorn or rejection, something for which they were not necessarily prepared because of the lack of awareness of cultural context.

So this musing answers my own question regarding why I bother. I bother informing people, even at the risk of being branded “the annoying anthropologist” (hey, it could be worse), because I fundamentally agree with some of their basic positions and want to equip them with better toolkits to defend their ways of life against the “moral majority”, if such a thing exists in Canada. I want them to be strong in the face of cross-examination. I want them to be able to offer content instead of fluff to those who would question their moral integrity.

Ideally, I do believe that cross-cultural knowledge should benefit everyone who is interested in it and that it should be accessible. However, it should also be presented in a way that is consistent with anthropology’s value of cultural relativity. Anthropologists who seek to inform the public about anthropological knowledge have fierce competition, though. Popular media, with their frequent lack of depth and integrity,have a nasty tendency to exoticise non-Western societies (yes, yes, I know this term is problematic). Even seemingly scientific documentaries often fool people into believing that they are being adequately informed about cross-cultural practices. It is this kind of exposure, the non-relativistic sort, that promotes a sort of folk, or pop, anthropology and I’m afraid this will lead to greater misunderstandings within and across cultures.

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Well I don’t think I have any more 2,000 word essays up my sleeve for a while—hopefully this will give people a chance to read the deluge of posts in the past couple of days, which I think have all been excellent. Instead I’ll just point people to a fascinating post at Volokh. Actually, the post itself is not that interesting. It just asks “what do you say in a job interview when they ask you What is your greatest weakness?. This is, of course, a topic that comes up constantly when grad students talk about finding an academic position. The interesting thing is the comments—where employers talk about how they evaluate your answers. Worth reading.

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The funniest thing happened in my Psychology of Learning course this past winter. The instructor had set up a class debate about the developmental theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky . Whereas Piaget’s work, in a grossly oversimplified nutshell, looks at children’s development through the various cognitive stages as a natural occurrence of sorts, Vygotsky’s ideas bring forth the importance of social interaction in the development of children’s cognitive abilities. In other words, it is interaction with more knowledgeable individuals that pulls children along through their cognitive development. The process whereby adults present children with problems that the children could not solve on their own and provide support so that the children can effectively learn the appropriate tasks is called scaffolding.

Oh, that wasn’t the funny part, by the way. The funny part is that I, the token anthropologist in the room, was randomly chosen to speak on behalf of the Vygotsky-ite team whereas the spokesperson for the Piaget-ites (ians?) was . . . you guessed it . . . a biologist (also randomly chosen).

Oh, it was great fun! I got to accuse her of biological determinism. (I should mention that I love accusing people of biological determinism and I do it as often as I can, in all sorts of contexts and in my most indignant voice: “You biological determinist, you!”) OK, so I guess you had to be there.

While the experience was a hoot, it got me thinking about teaching anthropology, especially to people in their late teens, which comprise the bulk of our student population at Vanier College. The knowledge that I gained about learning theories in this course was invaluable and, ever since I completed the course, I’ve been experimenting with ways to apply them specifically to anthropological content.

For example, Vygotsky’s sociocultural approach to learning is quite appealing from an anthropological perspective. It is in line, after all, with our notion of enculturation. It also fits right in with the middle ground in the nature vs. nurture debate where one refuses to go the extremes of biological or cultural determinism.

The compatibility goes beyond that, however. Vygotsky, like Piaget, can be categorised as a constructivist according to my instructor, which signifies adherence to a body of thought that posits that knowledge is constructed by the learner as opposed to being something that exists “out there”, external to the learner.

This has allowed me to move away from a teacher-centered classroom to a certain extent. With experimentation, I have found that my students already know much of what I’m there to teach them. By asking them questions such as “What do you think are some functions of religion?” and seeing that they explained most of what I was about to tell them, I saw that, in fact, all I was doing was giving them tools with which to discuss what they already know from an anthropological perspective. By posing questions that require them to think about prior knowledge in a new light and by providing them with tools that will help them to do it more effectively, I am providing scaffolding for them in their construction of anthropological knowledge rather then simply filling their brains and notebooks with knowledge that comes from outside of them.

Now, of course, I couldn’t just leave well enough alone. I’m a big fan of experiential anthropology (a.k.a. radical participation) and Jean-Guy Goulet’s work had a big influence on my M.A. research. Naturally, then, I was attracted to the idea of experiential learning where students engage in meaningful activities that will help them learn through the very process in which they are engaged.

In other words, I’m seeking to get away from the tendency to tell students what they need to know. Rather, I’m working toward using a greater number of activities that will allow them to realise that they know stuff (and I do call it stuff, just because . . . ) and that they can, with a little help from me or another qualified professional, figure out what it all means.

An example of an exercise that I’ve experimented with is the use of different coloured poker chips to demonstrate various methods of distribution such as generalised and balanced reciprocity. Before even telling them what these methods are, I set them up in small groups with little scenarios that they must act out according to what they think makes sense. You got it . . . we do play acting! Weeeeee!

When the gut reaction of the hunter is to keep all of the meat for herself, I ask her to think about the long run. A light goes on and s/he realises that s/he would lose social credibility if s/he did not share and that this could result in others not sharing with her a few weeks down the road. I get the students to explain all of this to me and then I give them a term: generalised reciprocity. And they get it because they already knew it in their own way.

So, what I am getting at with all of this is that the teaching of anthropology, especially to students who will not necessarily go on to major in the field, needs to be centered not just on learning anthropological jargon or on reading ethnographies but on figuring out, through experiential means, why things make sense in their various cultural contexts. The students at this age (17-19) have the capacity to do so but, as per Vygotsky’s theory, they need to be pulled through and supported in the construction of this knowledge. With more understanding of how learning takes place (in other words, with a little help from educational psych), I think that anthropology teachers can become more effective at this and, indirectly, have a social impact which reaches farther than the classroom and into the lives of future math teachers, business administrators, lawyers and plumbers.

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(Funny Chris should mention it. This is my submission for an essay competition held by the American Anthropological Association about AnthroSource. The topic is basically: “For the first time in its 103 year history, the AAA’s complete legacy of periodical publications is becoming available in a single digital resource… The AnthroSource Steering Committee challenges users and would-be users of AnthroSource to consider the current and future impact of this new resource on the scholarly enterprise.” Please feel free to debug my spelling, grammar, and ideas. and remember—it’s written for non tech-savvy anthros.)

It is easy to get too excited about technology. As Rousseau once remarked in a different essay competition, the progress of the Arts and Sciences isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Here I’ll argue that anthropological research is already being transformed by digital genres, and that while AnthroSource has the potential to bring the anthropological community together in deeply productive ways, there is a good chance it will not transform anthropological scholarship at all. Eric Raymond—Rousseau’s contrarian hacker reincarnation—famously argued that centrally organized and scrupulously planned “cathedral” style software development is less effective than “bazaar” schemes in which loose collections of projects coalesce into constellations of stupendous utility. AnthroSource, I’ll argue, has spent too much of its time decorating altar frontals when it should be leasing storefronts.

It is simply not true that AnthroSource is somehow new or interesting because it is digitizing anthropology’s textual patrimony. Compared to the natural sciences—or even political science—anthropology has been behind the curve in moving to digital distribution of content. In fact, the biggest thing holding content-aggregators like JSTOR back from slurping up all AAA texts into one gigantic database is the AAA’s (very proper) insistence on reserving its rights to its own journals for AnthroSource. So Voltaire’s quip about God is equally true of AnthroSource—if it did not exist, we would invent it.

In fact, we already have. A “bazaar” of web applications of the sort that Tim O’Reilly has labeled Web 2.0—site like del.icio.us, bloglines, Amazon, CiteULike, Google Scholar, and Jstor—have developed a method of browsing that revolutionizes scholarship. Here’s how:

Today most blogs, newspapers, and yes, academic journals, use RSS feeds. They use RSS to send you updates automatically when they’ve added new content and send these stories to you so you don’t have to visit the website to see them (tech-savvy readers will notice I’m simplifying). And RSS (unlike email alerts) lets you sort and organize information in new and powerful ways.

One of the most popular things to do with feeds is ‘aggregate’ them so you can browse through tons of them at once. For instance, I subscribe to a popular free web site called bloglines. Every morning I get up, turn on my computer, and read 116 different news sources. This includes the table of contents of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Law and Society Review, History and Anthropology, and Annual Review of Anthropology.

If I find a webpage I like I bookmark it using del.icio.us, a free website that lets me manage my bookmarks by tagging them—classifying them by keyword. If I find a citation I like, I add it to CiteULike, a free bibliography website which takes a book or article from amazon.com or jstor and automatically sucks its citation into its database. I can tag and sort my digital library based on keyword, I can export the data to endnote, and since CiteULIke is a website I can work with my PDFs and citations on any computer that has a net connection from Peoria to Port Moresby.

It gets better: these bookmarking services are social—I can read the tags of people I like to discover new articles, or I can discover new colleagues by paying attention to who has been tagging the same things I have. Best of all, these tags and authors themselves have an RSS feed. So every morning I don’t just read the table of contents for new journals—I read an RSS feed of all the article that people have tagged as ‘anthropology’ to get some sense of where the discipline’s attention is.

Here’s how we AnthroGeeks do research:

At a conference I heard someone mention “Rabinow and Rose’s new paper on biopower.” I went to scholar.google.com, typed in “Rabinow Rose biopower” and the article popped up. I saved the PDF to CiteULike to read later. An anthro blog with an RSS feed reported that Donna Goldstein’s Laughter Out Of Place won the Margaret Mead Award For Applied Anthropology. I bookmarked Goldstein’s CV on del.icio.us and her book on CiteUlike. If the Mead Award homepage had a feed I’d have subscribed to it so I could be updated about new winners. I was browsing through books when Amazon recomended Thinking from Things by Alison Wylie to me. I taged the book on CiteULike, googled her homepage, and bookmarked it on del.icio.us.

This bazaar-like information ecosphere makes research heart-stoppingly powerful and precise. I’m a Melanesianist who studies kinship but now I’m able to keep up with trends in anthropological theory, learn about ethnography in areas outside my speciality, and keep in touch with the four fields without having to go to the library. As a newly minted Ph.D. trying to make the transition from specialized reasearch to generalized teaching at a liberal arts college, this sort of power surfing is invaluable.

AnthroSource works with a small number of journals. It lets me bookmark articles, but it doesn’t let me tag them or share them. It sends me emails about new content, but if it had an RSS feed I could aggregate it in bloglines or export it to endnote. In comparison to my anthropological infomation bazaar, AnthroSource’s centralized, cathedral-style service is clunky and unlovable.

But what could it become?

Put it this way: Why join the AAA at all these days? You can usually get the journals online or from the library, the kerfufle about the 2004 meetings had something to upset everyone, and, believe it or not, some of us just aren’t interested in talking about the Yanomami any more. But AAA is where hiring happens, so people join because they have to, not because they want to.

I believe that AnthroSource can best be developed by taking its rich, peanut buttery center of digital content and wrapping it up in a delicious choclatey coating of socialy-oriented web applications. I think that AnthroSource, reconceived, could be a positive reason for people to reconnect to the AAA community. AnthroSource could be a place people will want to come if it allows them to connect both to digital content and each other.

How do we do this? There are, of course, issues of budget, privacy, and institutional politics. But let me mention some things that are technically feasible and have proven successful elsewhere.

First, AnthroSource must ‘open up and let go.’ These days, web sites become de facto standards by making themselves indispenable, not by locking users in. AnthroSource must give away as much free content as possible in as many forms as possible to make people hunger for what is behind the membership wall (we could even investigate open access scholarship). RSS feeds for every journal, author, and keyword in existence. Multiple ways to access abstracts. APIs so people can write new programs to interface with and extend AnthroSource’s functionality.

Second, learn the lessons of successful socially-based web applications and make AnthroSource a cooperation amplifier. Create multiple ways for users to organize information in their accounts. Then let them share that information with other users. Let them rate, reccomend, and tag articles, authors, and journals. Make friends lists and groups they can join. By creating technology that enables cooperation you create a network that increases in value everytime a new user joins.

Third, make AnthroSource a true portal for anthropology. Integrate it with AnthroCommons and the AAA homepage. Have AnthroSource, like CiteULike, index existing RSS feeds of interest to anthropologists—like IngentaConnect’s RSS feeds for journals—and include them in the journals that AnthroSource tracks. Offer free or discounted hosting for journals from third world countries to give them a voice. AnthroSource needs to become a nexus which integrates not just AAA related websites, but all freely available information on the web that anthropologists care about.

Fourth, and most ambitious, establish an optional webpresence for your users. Let them have a profile page where they can share information about themselves such as publications, preprints, and some form of public CV. If I found a journal by an author I liked, I could visit their homepage, learn more about them, and even see if they are giving a paper at the next AAA. Giving people a place where they can simply and effectively manage their online identity if they choose in the heart of the professional association of their discipline will increase our sense of connection.

The essay competition has always been a genre that institutions with a certain breathless enthusiasm use to simultaneously spread the word and figure out where they’re headed. Here I’ve tried to help AnthroSource do both. I’ve claimed it is in danger of reinventing the wheel, and possibly even creating a version with corners. However, if AnthroSource manages to learn from other virtual communities and integrates its role as a provider for digital data with its role as anthropology’s professional organization, it could play a vital role in the production not just of anthroplogical research, but anthropological community. Build it (well) and they will come.

Bibliography
(My God people—This is the internet. There is no bibliography. Follow the links!)

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Chalk one up for Irony biting you in the ass. My article “Geeks, Social Imarginaries and Recursive Publics” is in the Summer issue of Cultural Anthropology (after about 4 years of re-writing, but that’s OK, it’s a better article now). The ostensible topic of the paper is how geeks make a “recursive public” by addressing each other in public at the same time that they address the means of making that public public—such as the ability to create networks, license software openly, anonymously contribute and read, etc. A chunk of the paper is about my good friends over at Silk List, who are inverterately recursive publicans. The Irony comes in that one of them noted the appearance of the article in AnthroSource, our discipline’s new stab at digitizing the last 100 years of anthropological scholarship—but could not actually access a copy of it. Unfortunately, without a membership in the American Anthropological Association, the article costs $12. Not a bad price really, except that the research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, and any self-respecting American Taxpayer should balk at paying a second time for research they have already funded.

But the Irony does not end there. This semester I have affiliations at three separate universities—Rice University, MIT, and Harvard. It turns out all of these institutions have subscriptions to JSTOR-which contains copies of the journal up to 1997-but none of them have subscriptions to AnthroSource, which contains the last six years of the journal—so even having standing at three very rich institutions does not guarantee access. Fine—I’m a member of the AAA in good standing, I think, I’ll just access AnthroSource and download a copy of my own article. No go. The system doesn’t recognize any permutation of any of my email addresses from any of the 8 years of meetings I have been to. When I “register” at AnthroSource, there is no option for looking up my member standing. No doubt I will have to do some sort of telephone tag or email trail in order to find the person who can help fix the problem, and probably that only temporarily.

Rub 1: I can’t even get a copy of my own article.

I knew this would happen. When I was revising the article, I returned the author agreement with an amendment that would give me the right to distribute electronic copies under a Creative Commons license. I’ve done this with four other articles I have written, but the AAA (via the University of California) said, and I quote:

The AAA does not allow authors either to amend the standard agreement or to retain their copyrights…AAA is a non-profit, educational and scholarly publisher. It exists for anthropologists as their collective publishing arm—unlike the many commercial, for-profit publishers against which Creative Commons pits itself.

The asinine suggestion that somehow Creative Commons is pitted against commercial for-profit publishers notwithstanding, they seemed to misunderstand the fact that what I wanted to encourage was for people to read my article, not the destruction of the AAA. What I want them to see, in the midst of much gnashing of teeth in the discipline about so-called “public anthropology”, is that the goal of the society should be to promote and distribute our research, not restrict it, charge people twice for it or make our lives exceedingly difficult by burying the research inside passwords and accounts and cross-linked memberships that don’t work.

The cry always comes up: “but the AAA depends on subscription revenue, without it we will go bankrupt!” To this there are two answers: 1) if the only solution to this problem of revenue means sacrificing the goal of distributing our research or making it publicly available, then fine, adieu! But, more charitably 2) there should in fact be much more discussion about how to increase the revenue for the AAA—through means other than the restriction of research—especially publicly funded research. There are ways to do this and a very lively ongoing discussion in “Open Access” such as the work Peter Suber and Public Knowledge have done—why not engage it more?

Rub 2: So much for recursive publics in Anthropology… I hope at least that a few people at the AAA, who do have working accounts at Anthrosource will read my article…

Update: I forgot to mention that the AAA is having an essay contest to best describe “How Anthrosource will Transform Anthropological Scholarship.” I’m not sure I have 1500 words in me, but it kind of cries out for a submission…

Update Two: Check out what google Thinks You Mean when you search for anthrosource. Not good.

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