I’ve been challenged to provide some sort of definition of what I see as anthropology’s moral core. Though moving, illness, and teaching an accellerated course have kept me pretty busy, I have been trying to keep at least part of my brain engaged with the topics I raised a few weeks ago. Let me preface my remarks by noting that I don’t have any positive assertions to make—I have some ideas of what may or may not be integral to the practice of anthropology, but others are, of course, free to disagree. You won’t even hurt my feelings (much).

I also need to make a distinction that I failed to recognize earlier, and which may be one of the reasons why my post raised such consternation. Anthropologists are involved with moral issues in two senses; the first is in their personal, often politically-charged, response to the practices and beliefs they witness in the field or in their research. For instance, we might record instances of infanticide, or of government withholding of medical supplies, or of corporations breaking land-usage laws. Anthropologists may, despite cultural relativism, feel that such practices ought to be stopped or prevented, and depending on their politics and temperament may take an activist stance regarding such practices. This sort of thing has been covered quite a bit in the literature, and is the impetus behind much of the development of reflexive anthropology. It is not what I was getting at in my earlier post, though some of my examples led in this direction.

My concern is with the moral values and principles that are put into practice or embedded in the practice of anthropology itself. How do we justify our own existence? On what are our claims to authority premised? What do we hope to accomplish with our work? Obviously, there’s some grey areas between this sense and the sense I outlined above, but in many ways anthropology is a study of grey areas and I don’t find this overlap too disturbing. What I do find disturbing is the notion that anthropologists can adopt an attitude towards our subjects similar to that of a chemist or physicist (or engineer…). Thus, I would start an outline of moral principles with the simple recognition that we have an obligation not just to “do no harm” but to provide as honest and complete an account as possible. Note that I did not say “objective”—objectivity may be possible for gods and machines, but for human researchers (and this includes physicists and chemists) the best we can do is be honest.

But before we ever get into the field, there is the question of why we should even bother to deal with. We anthropologists are lucky enough to live in a world of massive specialization and fairly well-protected freedom of inquiry, but ultimately, we are still embedded in societies that have agreed to support us in exchange for our work. While I agree that “mere curiosity” about a people may well drive particular anthropologists’ work, this is neither a compelling justification of our field nor, in my opinion, a completely value-free proposition. Let me put it this way: why should state governments fund anthropology departments in public universites? What social good does anthropology provide?

I cannot even begin to fully answer all the questions I’ve raised, but here’s a “starter-list” of values I see at work in the discipline of anthropology as a whole:

• Difference, either among members of a society or between societies, is at worst not a problem, and is generally a Good Thing.


• The autonomy of self-defined groups of people should be protected wherever possible.


• Reprsentations of individuals and groups should be constructed honestly and with consideration for their effect on the people being described.


• The use of power to coerce individuals or groups is wrong, and is a demonstration of a failure of individuals, social institutions, or inter-group dynamics.


• People have a right to make mistakes (with a nod to Sol Tax).


• Race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, nationality, and other labels should not be used in ways that directly or indirectly restrict individuals’ or groups’ ability to function as a full part of the society or societies of which they are part.

Far from exhaustive, but a start. Some of these are probably controversial, and some are contradictory—for instance, when two groups use force in an attempt to protect their autonomy, does their right to autonomy take precendence or their right to be free from coercion? I’m completely comfortable with such contradictions—we are, after all, human beings, tricksy creatures under the best of circumstances. I can’t help but notice that some of these don’t seem to be very controversial at all: the AAA’s code of ethics—and the AAA is far from a radical organization—includes language that isn’t far off from some of these. The controversy lies, I think, in calling this “morality”—while “ethics” can be read as principles for good scientific research, “morals” necessarily invoke limited, local, personal definitions of “right” and “wrong”, which is not just unscientific to some, but anti-scientific. My basic contention is that ignoring the moral nature of our work is intellectually dishonest, and in fact hinders our claim to scientificity. As I noted above, personal moral convictions—and the way they come into play in the course of our research—have been addressed (if only partially and sporadically) with the rise of reflexivity in anthropology, so what I guess I’m calling for is a kind of “social reflexivity” to make explicit the values that we as a field bring to our subject matter. This would involve a close look at the practices with which anthropological knowledge is created, not just the “end-product” of ethnography and theory (sorry Clifford and Marcus—I love you guys, I really do, but there’s a lot that goes on before we start “writing culture”). We are used to seeing values enacted or embodied in the slightest gestures of our subjects; I think we are fooling ourselves if we think that note-taking, conference-presenting or -attending, publishing, teaching, grantwriting, interviewing, blogging, and the other practices from the field to the academy don’t similarly enact or embody values that, inasmuch as anthropology has some degree of unity as a discipline, are shared.

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In one of my first posts on Savage Minds I discussed the convention of using a “man in the street” interview in journalism. Two recent Mark Liberman posts on Language Log raise more general questions about the use of interviews as data. In “Ritual questions, ritual answers,” he argues that

The journalists already know what the stories are. Their questions are not designed to discover any new facts or ideas, but rather to get quotes that will fit in to designated places in the frameworks of logic and rhetoric that they have already erected.

And in “Down with journalists!” he reinforces this argument with a funny example in which a French journalist finds himself the victim of this very practice.

We all know that this happens, just as we know that these quotes often server little more than a ritual function, but what can we do about it?

One option is to make the source data – the interviews themselves – available to download. In fact, such “grey literature” may eventually become available as part of AnthroSource, but it will not be easy. For one thing, there are confidentiality concerns. How do we make our data publicly available while still protecting our sources? It is possible to do – but it would create a huge burden on researchers. In essence, one might be punished for being a good researcher and collecting large amounts of data, because then you would have to carefully censure much more data to make sure it is safe for public consumption.

Making such data available online is not something that is without precedent in the field. Johannes Fabian’s book Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire is very much a collaboration with his informant, the artist Tshibumba Kanda Matulu. The full interviews are available online, as part of the Archives of Popular Swahili website (which, in turn, is part of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa website). Now, this is somewhat different in that Tshibumba Kanda Matulu is an internationally famous artist, who is anything but an anonymous informant, and the book is constructed in such a way that his discourse is allowed to challenge Fabian’s authorial authority.

Such a model may not work for all ethnographies and all situations, but it will be interesting to see what happens as more and more primary anthropological data becomes available online. Will anthropologists creatively re-mix each other’s data? Will informants salvage their message from the grand narratives of the anthropologists? Will computational methodologies and google allow for the work to be analyzed in new ways? Or will anthropologists resist to the bitter end in the name of protecting their informants … even when they might just be protecting their own reputations? Which isn’t to say that confidentiality isn’t a real concern – just that we should think twice before ducking for cover.

NOTE: My thinking on this topic dates back to an e-mail exchange I had with Mark Liberman last year about the topic of posting primary data online.

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I am the kind of guy who, at the end of a long day of teaching and writing, sits down to his computer, fires up the word processor, and starts writing blog entries which quote Thucydides. I’m pretty good at googling around the internet for texts like Thucydides, but this time around I was impressed by how many seconds were shaved off my search by the Online Books Page which is a handy little digest that deserves a nod on SM.

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How come there’s not more anthropologists listed in David Horowitz’s list of academic traitors? We’ve worked hard to earn such an honor, and as I’ve noted before, others from McCarthy himself to the ACTA have seen fit to recognize our contributions to the intellectual well-being of the United States. I could only place three: Lila Abu-Lighod (note the post-modern shudder quotes around “gender, class, and modernity” in her profile, as if those things really don’t exist, ha ha), Nicholas de Genova, and Gayle Rubin. Granted, I haven’t gone person by person through the list, so there may well be one or two whose names I don’t recognize, but still—out of about 200 names, anthropologists should make up at least 15 or 20. If we can’t earn Horowitz’s scorn, then what the heck are we doing out here anyway?!

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There has been a lot of discussion on the blog about CiteULike and getting it to work with AnthroSource. But what does it all mean? And how does one use it? This post is intended to help get you started.

First, some background. (Skip ahead if you want to get your feet wet actually using these technologies right away.)

In my forthcoming Anthropology News article (accidentally posted to the web early because they told me it would be in the May issue, but then it got bumped till September), I describe the concept of folksonomy:

As opposed to previous systems, which required each piece of information to be classified by a professional archivist, as in the Dewey decimal system used by libraries, a folksonomy asks each user to classify information as they see fit, sharing the resulting classifications between users. This works with electronic documents because, unlike a book on a library shelf, each item can be filed in more than one place. Imagine a virtual library where everyone shelved books as they do in their own home. While some people’s shelving skills may be sorely lacking, the chances are that at least one other person would have filed Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific in exactly the same place you would expect to find it—under “ethnography.” If there are an infinite number of virtual copies it doesn’t matter that someone else mistakenly filed it under “astronaut.”

CiteULike is one of many new systems which use such “social tagging” to classify information online, but unlike del.icio.us which specializes in storing URLs, and Flickr which specializes in photographs, CiteULike specializes in academic literature. Specifically, CiteULike allows scholars with access to full-text databases not readily available to the public to bookmark and tag those references. That means you can use CiteULike with commonly used databases like JSTOR (and now AnthroSource), as well as public sites like Amazon.

Now, how to use it? There are actually two ways to answer that question. Rex has already described how he fits CiteULike into his academic research. So I will answer the more basic question, of how one actually gets started using the service.

It is actually quite simple. (more…)

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I don’t exactly know where I found the time to do this, and something else, like my child or my career, will no doubt suffer, but here it is: you can now Cite What U Like at CiteULike from Anthrosource. Thanks to Alex, Kerim and Bob Offer-Westort for help in putting it together. ( Oh, and Richard Cameron, of CiteULike, of course, who helped clarify obscurities involving whitespace. Which in some departments might get him a PhD .)

So, try it out, my folksonomic researching fiends.

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This New York Times article riffs off the Fortune article mentioned by Christopher some time ago. To wit: “In an effort to grow ever closer to its customers, Microsoft has hired numerous social scientists, including anthropologists, to help it understand the natives, who in this case are the small-business owners who use its software.” And because someone at NYTimes obviously reads Savage Minds, the last line is a nod to the Indiana Jones thing: “Maybe Harrison Ford can play Mr. Gates in the movie.”

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I never studied Latin, but the title supposedly translates as “Celadus the Thracier makes the girls moan!” and was discovered, along with much other well preserved ancient graffiti, in Pompeii.

From the archaeology blog A Visible City, we learn that the archaeology of graffiti has come a long way from copying boastful scribblings on ancient ruins. A recent NY Times article discusses the web site Graffiti Archaeology, which won a Webby award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The site allows you to explore how a single surface changes over time as old graffiti is covered over by the new.

In effect, Mr. Curtis has made antigraffiti. He uncovers the layers that each successive graffiti artist has covered up..

The Times article criticizes the site for failing to include some of the photographic context necessary for a more academic endeavor. But even though it won the Webby in the “art” category, I difer to Alexandra’s expertise when she says that “it is fair to call it archaeology.”

There is also a Graffiti Archaeology Flickr pool.

Finally, via Boing Boing, I discovered some early 18th century English graffiti, including this one:

No Hero looks so fierce in Fight, As does the Man who strains to sh-te.

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Over the weekend I’ve been reading Aping Language, Joel Wallman’s scrupulous dissection of claims that apes can learn language. It is well-written and brief (the main body of the text is just about 150 pages). In fact I would even go so far as to say it was a great read, except that Wallman’s analysis of the data is too close for someone like me, a sociocultural anthropologist who just wants the big picture and isn’t too interested in nitty-gritty on a lazy saturday afternoon. Indeed, Wallman seems at times to be actively supressing a talent for academic bloodsport which, while discrediting his books objectivity, would make it much more entertaining. Those of us just along for the ride have to content ourselves with zingers like this:

Partisans of the apes have protested that detractors employ rubber rulers and moving targets in comparing apes and children. The ape researchers, on the other hand, could be described as having fixated on certain of these criteria, generally the most mechanical and readily quantified, and then having either expressly trained them or searched them out in their data. This, in itself, is not an objectionable practice. One is put in mind, however, of Diogenes, the Athenian cynic who, in response to Plato’s definition of man as “a featherless biped,” produced a plucked chicken. In both cases, the claimed identity may be valid on the narrow grounds used, but there is still a profound difference between the alleged equivalent and the genuine article. The difference between the cases—aside from the fact that, as I have argued, the apes are not equivalent to children on the various indices used in the literature—is that Diogenes knew he was holding a chicken.

From now on I’m going to incorporate the phrase “that guy’s holding a chicken (and he doesn’t even know it)” into my academic discourse whenever possible.

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(update: Thanks to some fancy scriptin’ by Chris AnthroSource and CiteULIke now play well together and Kerim even has a tutorial on how to use the two if you are not super web-savvy. Happy tagging!)

As Kerim recently noted CiteULike doesn’t know how to work with AnthroSource. This makes interweb-savvy anthros cry. Luckily, Richard—the good soul behind CiteULike—has recently released a CiteULike Developers Plugin Kit which allows anyone with even a little scripting savvy to write a plugin that will allow AnthrSource and CiteULike to play well together (AnthroSource’s URLs look pretty easy to parse out, based on what I’ve seen).

Does anyone feel like writing up such a thing? I would do so myself but I am already so over committed it isn’t even funny If anyone out there feels so inclined PLEASE let me know—not only will you get mad props from Savage Minds, you’ll demonstrate to AnthroSource and the AAA the power of open source development and open access scholarship. And, most important of all, you’ll make the web a better place for everyone to browse.

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Jacques Attali, who was otherwise only known to me as the author of a great little book on “noise” but was actually founding president of the European Development Bank (shows where i’ve had my head…), has penned this curious piece calling for a “UN for NGOs”—essentially a formalization of their role in global governance. This strikes me as very french (though not in the way that Attali’s book on Noise will no doubt strike many as very french), especially the demand to rename them “solidarity institutions.” But what I find most curious is the unrepentant, somewhat naive glorification of the NGO as the motor of civil society. Clearly there are bad and good NGOs, and at least a few dissertations I have supervised have focused on the weird parasitic role these institutions often play, especially in poorer nations, on the activities of well-meaning citizens. Even when they work (Grameen Bank, perhaps), they demand a critical eye, and they are best held to account precisely because there is no global or local guarantee of their existence. Attali seems to want to formalize them in order to ensure the existence of “civil society.” This strikes me as particularly poor thinking—since civil society, like that other mysterious entity “the public” exists only when it has no singloe concrete form. But, I ask, what do savage minds think? Global governance by NGOs: hot or not? And what’s a better name than “solidarity institutions”?

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Although I can’t add links to journal articles that are only listed in AnthroSource, I have been compiling a list of all the books and articles that have been mentioned in Savage Minds over the past month. The list is surprisingly long, considering the short life of this blog! And I don’t even think I got all of them.

Please help maintain the list. If you post something, or read something in Savage Minds that isn’t listed, just bookmark it in CiteULike and add the tag: “savageminds”. (And please don’t use that tag for anything that isn’t mentioned in a blog post – there is also the tag “anthropology” that can be used for non SM anthropology related items.)

Thanks!

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Tad at Fieldnotes has a post on Resources for Researching Aboriginal Issues that I find quite interesting. The second resource that he mentions in his post is a researcher’s handbook by the Union of BC Indian Chiefs called Stolen Lands, Broken Promises . This is basically a guide for Aboriginal community members who wish to do research on various issues affecting their communities. The various chapters touch on different but related research topics of interest to anthropologists. What particularly caught my attention was chapter 8: Anthropology Resources .

Unsurprisingly, the ethnocentric nature of some anthropological research projects is pointed out. In fact, the authors of this handbook are very well aware that the early anthropological project was mostly reflective of Western values that were tied into a colonial project in many ways. For example, the following statement jumped out at me:

Whatever the scope of your project, you will need to make sure you cafefully analyze the material you collect. Anthropological reports were most often produced by outside researchers with distinctly different cultural practices and expectations than the people they studied. They may include important information but they may also reveal more about the beliefs and values of the time and place in which they were created. Often, these studies may meet the standards of academic research but fail to accurately represent Indigenous Peoples and our communities. Consider the biases and limitations in the documents you encounter while extracting the information you need for your research.

To me, this touches on several of the topics we have discussed here on SM recently. More specifically, theory and morality come to mind. I’ve long been ambivalent about the process of theorising about a group of people with the goal of contributing to an overarching “scientific” project, particularly when the people being theorised about have little voice with regards to the theories constructed around them or little concern for the scientific project of theory creation. Therefore, I feel that Aboriginal peoples are justified in their wariness of anthropological research. We cannot deny that many ethnographies have unjustly portrayed Aboriginals and other societies, sometimes to the detriment of fruitful dialogue.

During my own fieldwork in Chisasibi, the comment was made to me that the Cree had felt misrepresented in some previous works and were now quite sceptical of what exactly anthropologists were trying to do. As noble as I felt my intentions were at the time (ie. to help foster inter-cultural communication), in the end my project benefited me much more than the community that hosted me: it got me an M.A. and a subsequent job at a publicly funded college. In the 7 years since my fieldwork, I have not yet even had the opportunity to go back to Chisasibi to give the band council a copy of my thesis as promised. I could mail it . . .but it wouldn’t be the same.

On the other hand, I feel strongly that anthropologists can and should be doing research that both meets the standards of academic research and fulfills a need that Aboriginal communities may have, taking into account their perspectives on self-representation. Of course, this may require changes in the criteria for academic research in the first place.

How are anthropologists supposed to preach cultural relativity if we can’t practice it with regards to cultural differences in the perception of how cross-cultural research should be carried out? This strikes me as a fundamental problem in anthropolical research, a sort of hypocrisy, that continues to plague us in spite of ongoing critiques by the people with whom we deal and to whom we owe our livelihood.

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For the next month or so I’ll be moderating comments on SM while Kerim is off doing other things in ‘real life’. We get lots of comments and lots of comment spam, so having someone with more time on their hands to deal with this should alleviate any problems y’all might have noticed. However I do want to say a few quick things about comments:

First, I live in the middle of the Pacific, so most of my moderating will occur during what is ‘late night’ for the mainland. Please keep this in mind and be patient. Thanks.

Second, if your comments do not immediately appear on the site, please do not post them again. Multiple postings of nearly-identical comments is one of the criteria that our spam filter uses to judge spam. Therefore reposting will almost definitely result in your comments being sucked off into a black void from whence they will never return. If you think you have something REALLY important to say that is not getting said quick enough, you can email me to let me know there is a problem. Please don’t tell the filter, or ‘test’ it or anything like that. It will just learn to like you less and less.

In sum, I’ll be tweaking the settings on the filter over the next few days to try to minimize shemale phentermine Teaxas Hold ‘Em comments and maximize disagreement about the relevance of biology for understanding human social life. Please bear with me. Thanks for reading and commenting.

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I haven’t followed the case so I don’t know its outcome—perhaps some UK commentators can update us? —but an anthropological essay I find I have on the brain a lot these days is one written in 1999 by British anthropologist Alison Spedding. The full reference is at the end of this post; it was in Anthropology Today and I am not sure how to provide a universally accessible link.

At any rate, Spedding was writing from a Bolivian prison where she had been incarcerated (for 6 months at that point) on drug charges. Somehow under the conditions she managed to produce an amazingly thoughtful piece on the peculiarities of fieldwork. She writes of the “screen personality” we tend to adopt in the field—eating lamb flaps we don’t like, going to religious services we don’t believe in, nodding sympathetically to accounts of gender relations we’d condemn if they came from friends back home—and how impossible it was for her to maintain such a screen while in prison.

From there, she goes on to discuss the standard modality of ethnographic explanation: that “the apparent superstition is a reasonable way to understand the world, that what seems irrational is in fact entirely rational when one comprehends its context”. At the time of her writing, this mode wasn’t really working for her—when her fellow prisoners spent money on llama sacrifices and the like to influence the outcomes of their trials instead of using whatever funds they possessed to hire lawyers, she couldn’t help feeling it was basically counter-productive. And when women prisoners eagerly participated in the gender regimes of the prison routine she couldn’t help finding it, well, upsetting. The article ends on a rather despairing note (understandably). I can’t recreate its whole arc in this space but I highly recommend it.

So anyway—I thought about this article occasionally when I was writing my thesis, especially the bits on witchcraft. For all the structural rationales I could tease out about witchcraft discourse in the Bolivian community in which I carried out fieldwork, part of what motivated it seemed to be a kind of malicious glee. But mostly I ended up in the standard anthropological mode of explaining its relationship to social structure and so forth. Whatever, right? In the end I didn’t live in Isoso and neither I nor my loved ones would ever face witchcraft accusation.

However, living in the States the past few years I’ve started to get a bit of that ol’ Bolivian prison feeling. Of course my existence is quite cushy. But I mean in terms of hearing and being forced to live with rhetorics, discourses, regimes, practices—the lot—that I don’t want merely to understand/explain/analytically dissect. I don’t have a “screen personality” here—I’m me, and a lot of what is around me looks like flat-out meanness and stupidity. Are anthropologists allowed to say that? and having said it, then what?

article ref: Dreams of Leaving: Life in the Feminine Penitentiary Centre, Miraflores, La Paz, Bolivia, by A. L. Spedding
Anthropology Today (1999)

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