Tue 27 Sep 2005
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In Rex’s post about FLOSS he argues that Open Source is so popular among aca [...]

I strongly suspect that Biella is right here. The scholar as hyperindividual, armored in academic freedom and concealed in classrooms where Teacher is the one, ultimate authority is a prototype that my personal experience suggests is pervasive, not just in anthropology but throughout the modern university—the exception being those fields, mostly hard science, where shared use of expensive laboratories and the need for grunts to mind experiments enforces more cooperation than normal.

But this is largely conjecture based on a life that has, for the last few decades, included only tangential connection with academic organizations. Does anyone have any data?

The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, having written over 500 pages of a long-promised book, loathe to put an end to the process of revision, addition, and debate that others´ contributions stimulate, decided to “publish”–ie, make public–his work on a wiki entitled AmaZone (I´m afraid to put the link here because of spam or whatever, but googling ´amazone wikicities´ will get you where you need to be). There, some rough text originally by Viveiros de Castro forms the basis of a continually evolving, collective effort to whom anyone may contribute, modifying, adding, subtracting, etc. The wiki concerns amerindian ´perspectivism´ and is centrally focused on amazonian ethnography, but its themes run from art history to the philosophy of language.

The wiki is multilingual though predominantly in portuguese. Viveiros de Castro admits that the format is more conducive to established professors than young, perish-threatened scholars. Anyway, the project presents an alternative forum and process of “authorial multiplication.”
I know of no other comparable effort within anthropology.

AmaZone is also associated with the Abaete Network for Symmetric Anthropology, which has its own wiki.

Actually I think many fields, hard or soft science, have a problem with over specializations and then an inability to have this long, meta conversation. Medicine is a classic case in fact. Many current chronic disorders span different speacialites, such as rheumatology and neurology and these docs are not talking to each other and frankly also have problems keeping up with the knowledge in their own fields, even if they had “more access.”

More than ever doctors have to take examinations to keep up to date with just their own fields, or rely on patients who are on the ground, connecting the dots, as best they can, because their doctors don’t. This has caused somewhat of crisis in medicine, seeing information sharing among patients as suspect. This is probably where one of the largest open source projects does exist btw, among patients, sharing information and experience about medical conditions that are only half heardedtly accepted by coventional med. I guess my basic point is I think hyper-fragmentation and specialization is more the norm, than not, in most of disciplines. And give this state, the question of access and collabortation does change some.

oneman wrote, “There are plenty of scenarios where “one village, one anthropologist” is most definitely the way to go. But surely there are situations in which collaboration adds something that a lone researcher could not or would not be able to do on their own?

Kerim writes, ” Do we believe in the notion of cumulative knowledge or not? …. With anthropology, however, it seems less clear to me that we are all engaged in a common task.”

Here, I believe, we come to the heart of our dilemma. The histories of science, religion, law, business—any large-scale human activity—demonstrate repeatedly that both individual genius, often laboring in obscurity, and collective, organized effort are required to achieve important results. This is, of course, a central lesson in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where long periods of normal science, gathering data and performing experiments within an established paradigm, are occasionally punctuated by paradigm-shifting revolutions. An analogous point is made by historians and political scientists who distinguish between transformational and transactional leadership, the former supplying the inspirational, initially individual vision, the latter doing the grunt work that transforms vision into effective organization.

Seen in this light, we might ask why have anthropologists as a discipline remained largely content to insist—albeit with self-doubt and professional anxiety— on the value of the small sparks of insight derived from individual fieldwork and resistant to the value of sustained, on-going cooperation to accomplish collective projects that do, indeed, demonstrate belief in cumulative knowledge?

Speaking only for myself, I can note that I was, indeed, attracted to anthropology by the jumble of possibilities it offered—where else could I go on doing research that combined aspects of the philosophy, medieval history, psychology and mathematics I studied as an undergraduate? What other field would leave me so alone, and, indeed, encourage me, to do my own thing, while at the same time (we are talking about the late 1960s) offering the chance to go off on the personal vision quest called fieldwork at someone else’s expense? For a fat, astigmatic kid who had never been good at sports, a watcher standing on the edge of social groups, never comfortable immersed in a group, a smartass who wanted to be able to say, “Look what I’ve done” and have it mean more than doing what teachers told me to do, anthropology looked like heaven.

It is not accidental, then, that I read Claude Levi-Strauss’ description in Tristes Tropiques of two types of French university students, the monkish, scholarly types whose dearest wish was never to leave school and the hearty, athletic types eager to get school over with and get on with their careers and felt instant empathy with the former.

What I learned from social anthropology, however, was to look beyond the ideas and feelings that shaped a single self to examine how institutions, economic conditions, and other social facts shape the situations in which a self is embedded.

Here is where I feel a bit mis-read by Rex. My job-market approach to the sociology of knowedge and cooperation or lack there of in a field called anthropology is by no means an attempt to justify the current situation. It is rather an attempt to understand it and—I can’t resist, having at various points in my life, been seriously involved in both business and politics, where the watcher must summon the courage to act—ask how new technologies might be used to facilitate change. Because, at the end of the day, Kerim’s question is, to me, right on the money.

If we do believe in cumulative knowledge, we then have to ask ourselves how knowledge accumulates. We have to ask ourselves what questions will make our knowledge valuable in a world where information is increasingly overabundant, thus cheap. Then we have to ask what kinds of cooperation are needed to produce valuable knowledge.

History’s lesson is clear. Transformative genius is rare, and most of us won’t fit the bill. What, then, do we need to do collectively to test and refine insight and build theories (frameworks, interpretations) with solider foundations than, “This is what I believe.”

For other disciplines – such as medicine – it seems much more important to be having a single conversation. At least with respect to a particular problem. I think that, more than the issues of funding, this is why you see medicine embracing Open Access. While I personally don’t think anthropology shares the same systems of knowledge building that we see in medicine, I would still like anthropology to move in this direction. I don’t like the fact that anthropological theorizing is so faddish, and often so insular. I would like to see conference papers published on the web so that our corridor conversations are brought out into the open for all to see. I personally suspect that anthropologists share a deep insecurity about the epistemological foundations of their discipline and they don’t like airing their dirty laundry for this reason; but I think anthropologists should get over it and adopt more open methods of knowledge sharing. And not for the sake of collaborative research, but for the sake of sharing that knowledge with the people about whom we’ve produced that knowledge – people who are more and more likely to have some kind of access to the web no matter where they are in the world.

There are many many ways in which anthropologists can and do collaborate, all of which have their strengths and weaknesses and are appropriate for certain circumstances. I don’t understand why John and others have argued that ‘collaboration’ must mean a multiauthored paper that has come out of a group research project like a lab, or that this sort of work somehow marks an advance over other forms of collaboration and signals the strength and maturity of the discipline. And in light of Oneman’s comments, I don’t see how the proposition that “anthropologists are unwilling to share their ideas or data because they have see them as their intellectual property” can stand.

As I attempted to say, and will say again, I’m not sure what the academy can gain from trying to adopt an ‘open source’ (whatever that means) approach when the entire discipline is already acting in an ‘open source’ way (hence my analogy at the end of this blog entry). I’ve maintainted throughout this discussion that the key things we gain are a new series of legal forms (licenses)which institutionalize our prexisting professional commitment to the dissemniation of information. I think this is a more enduring and more important benefit than what Biella has appropriately called ‘the fever for the flavor of foss’ (which may even just be the flavor of the month). I’ve argued that such a fever is less central than licenses for two reasons. First, because a strict reading of ‘open source’ — in which we literally make our sources and data available — is problematic (for reasons I outlined above) and a loose or metaphoric reading of ‘open source’ (or being ‘inspired’ by FOSS) seems only to present the old wine of academic collaboration in new FOSS inspired bottles — and may only be tenuously related to the actual practice of coders.

Why is group research somehow preferable to individual research

It’s not, of course — except when it is. I’m sure there are plenty of scenarios where “one village, one anthropologist” is most definitely the way to go. But surely there are situations in which collaboration adds something that a lone researcher could not or would not be able to do on their own? If not in the field (however loosely defined) then in the classroom, in the library, in the writing-up process, and in the kind of stuff I’ve called “second-order” work (which I agree with the writer of TechnoTaste is a bad name) — the post-ethnographic analysis and cataloguing of said analyses. After all, the original study didn’t ask if anthros would be willing to share their “fieldspace” with other anthrs (which we do anyway, in virtually every instance) but whether we’d share our works-in-progress publicly.

One area that collaboration technologies can be especially helpful in is in ethnology — the process of comparison and theory-building. Think of the great classic works of theory — Mauss’ _The Gift_, for isntance. While written by one person, Mauss’ work is intensely collaborative, with fieldworkers around the globe sensing him reports they thought might prove useful to his project (talk about theory in practice!). MOst of us lack the intensive knowledge of cultural contexts outside of our own area of expertise to do the kind of comparison Mauss did — let alone to advance the field beyond what Mauss did. Of course, there’s the library nad the postal system, the same resources Mauss depended on, but given the availability of vastly increased technical resources, it seems odd that we should be unwilling or unable to improve on those old-school sources.

In short, it’s not an either/or proposition — either lone wolf anthro or collaboration from start to finish. The open source model hasn’t significantly changed the physical process any given programmer uses to writes code — open source has simply allowed individual programmers to magnify their efforts drastically, so that instead of a text editor, an entire office suite can be developed. That doesn’t mean there’s no need for text editors.

To put it another way, why blog? Why is blogging better, and what is it better than? I think you can see that it’s a useless question — I’m sure we all have our personal resons for being on Savage Minds, but I doubt any of us is here because, say, it means we no longer have to go to association meetings. Blogging accomplishes something that association meetings cannot, just as those metings do something blogging can’t.

More importantly, how has it somehow become emblematic of ‘collaboration’ — as if the only form that ‘collaboration’ with colleagues could take is in a shared lab? John asks what sorts of mechanisms anthropologists have in place for sharing partially formulated ideas and the answer, of course, is: LOTS. In fact, these institutions were the topic of my original post. We give papers at the meetings of professional associations. We give papers to colleagues in our own universities. We give papers at other universities as guest speakers. We regularly email drafts of our papers to other specialists in our area. We go out to coffee, for beer, and invite people over to our house for dinner. We have reading groups and presentations. Often times our partially formed ideas aren’t even written up — we just talk about them with people. When we write them up, we do do sometimes do so collaboratively. When we publish them in edited volumes, a good editor will have a huge impact on strengthening and improving our contributions. All of this clearly constitutes ’sharing partially formulated ideas’, although whether you think it counts as ‘open source’ or ‘collaboration’ is of course up to you to decide.