Should we outsource anthropology?

I just got back from the latest Allen Chun production at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica: “Culture in Context: Pragmatics, Industries, Technologies, Geopolitics.” Allen regularly hosts thought provoking interdisciplinary conferences. One cool Savage Minds connection was made this year, as frequent SM commentator John McCreery was the chair on one panel and I was the discussant on another.

My panel was entitled, “Flows and Boundaries, Real or Imagined,” and I had the honor of discussing papers by George Ritzer and George Marcus. Allen instructed us to discuss all the panel papers together, rather than taking them each separately. With one paper a survey on outsourcing, and the other a meditation on anthropological methodology, it at first seemed like an impossible task; however, I decided to have some fun with it and people seemed to enjoy the result. Since the papers are available online, and all my references are online as well, I thought it would be appropriate to post the full text of my discussion here on Savage Minds.

I urge everyone to please take the time to read through Ritzer and Marcus’ original papers before reading my commentary since it was written with a certain contextual setting in mind.

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Reading these two papers together, the question occurred to me: Is George Marcus advocating the outsourcing of anthropology? Given Marcus’ emphasis on “collaboration” and “complicity,” I think he would balk at using a term which implies a new form of global exploitation. Surely the move from Malinowskian models of data collection to more “explicit” collaboration implies less exploitation rather than more? And yet, Ritzer and Lair ’s paper has opened up the semantic space of the term “outsourcing,” forcing us to examine a wider range of activities. Might collaborative multi-sited ethnography fit within this expanded definition? There are some striking similarities, if not in the practices that each author describes, they are there in the conditions and processes which have given rise to them and enabled them.

For starters, both are predicated upon the inclusion of millions of people from developing nations into the ranks of the global middle class. Even as global inequality accelerates apace, more people than ever before have access to high quality education, professional jobs and credit cards; allowing more people than ever before to imagine themselves as part of a cosmopolitan middle class. Even those of us who work in some of the poorest and most underprivileged communities in the world are likely to encounter at least a few community members with the means and ambition to enter this newly expanding and yet still very restricted club. This is important, because the cultural capital they acquire from being even a virtual member of this club is as important as any technical skills they might acquire. For a phone bank operator in Bangalore, knowledge of baseball might be as important as their excellent English.

For us to imagine a truly collaborative ethnographic encounter, our collaborator will need much more cultural capital than one can acquire from watching NBA games and episodes of “Friends” in order to effectively negotiate how her community is imagined by global academic institutions and media outlets. Amazingly, collaborators with such skills and cultural capital are not as unusual as prejudice would lead us to think; yet we should not take it for granted either. The skills necessary to effectively participate in a shared imaginary are not equally distributed. Part of being a collaborator is precisely the leveraging of our own cultural capital and social network in the aid of a shared project. In this sense, we might even argue that the ideal collaborative relationship across an unequal global divide is one in which it is the anthropologist herself who is being outsourced.

The second shared feature of collaborative ethnography and outsourcing lies in the importance of new communication technologies. But we should not get too caught up in the admittedly tantalizing possibility of being able to conduct video interviews over Skype. Expanding networks are an important part of the story, but I don’t think they are the most important by far. Nor is the rise of a global consumer culture I mentioned before. Much more important is the spread of technology which enables consumers of culture to be producers of culture as well. When I travel to an urban ghetto in India to make a documentary film, I shouldn’t be surprised to meet someone in the neighborhood making their own award-winning documentary films about other marginalized communities or someone else who has set up his own blog. It is precisely this kind of experience as knowledge producers, not just users or consumers, which is giving our collaborators the necessary cultural capital to understand how to work with the producers and guardians of anthropological knowledge.

Here too, however, a word of caution is in order. We shouldn’t be too quick to assume that the technological power to produce knowledge automatically imbues users with the skills necessary to be effective collaborators. The number one user-produced video YouTube.com this past summer was not the home-spun video blog it pretended to be, it turned out to be a sophisticated hoax produced by aspiring independent filmmakers. And while user-generated content may indeed make up the bulk of raw material posted to the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, a select group of less than one hundred people are responsible for most of the site’s editing. In other words, while new technology has indeed lowered the barrier to participation, the technical knowledge, skills, cultural capital, and perhaps most importantly, the time necessary to shape that content remains the exclusive purview of a relatively small global elite.

The move towards collaborative ethnography discussed by Marcus highlights the important role anthropologists play in enabling our collaborators to be producers of anthropological knowledge. Yet as much as new technology has enabled the shared “imaginary” Marcus talks about, there is one area where Anthropology has yet to take the most important step. In June of this year the AAA signed on to a letter expressing (on our behalf!) the organizations opposition to the Federal Research Public Access Act which would have required “final manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal articles based on federally-funded research to be made freely available on government-hosted websites six months after publication.” How can anthropologists work collaboratively with people who are unlikely to have free access to the same body of knowledge that we do? At a time when rural villages in India have web access the subaltern can now start their own blogs, indeed they are doing so already, but they still can’t read anthropology articles online. Marcus describes anthropologists and their collaborators as having millenarian aspirations towards impacting health policy; but Anthropological Journals have yet to follow medical journals in adopting an Open Access model of publication.

The third and last similarity I would like to discuss is the realignment in power relations between the middle classes in the developing and the developed world. The world is not “flat” by any means, but for a small segment of the world’s population it sure seems that way. This flattening process has engendered the “moral panic” Ritzer and Lair allude to at the end of their paper. Similarly, I think the entry of large numbers of third world elites into U.S. institutes of higher learning is an important part of the story behind the “moral panic” faced by anthropology in the 1980s. This is important to remember; not to detract from the importance of the changes this panic engendered, but to highlight the institutional uniqueness of this change. The national anthropologies of many countries remains far more like the Malinowskian ideal Marcus moved away from than the paraethnographic ideal he argues so eloquently for today.

This brings me to the second question that I found myself wondering about as I read both papers. What are the limits of these globalizing processes which facilitate seemingly endless forms of outsourcing and the virtual character of the “collaborative imaginary”? Let me approach this through the concept of “scale” as articulated in Tsing’s Friction, and discussed in Marcus’ paper. Taking scale seriously can allow a cosmopolitan intellectual, an NGO worker, and a local activist to better understand how their various projects might interconnect. Not because they are each working at their own level of expertise, as in the traditional sociological distinction between macro- and micro-analysis; but rather because they are aware of the “scale-making projects” shaping work at each level. The question I have about Tsing’s concept of scale is whether there is any way to link the same level of magnification on different maps. How do we zoom out from the grassroots level in Indonesia to the global view, and then zoom back in on grassroots activity in India?

I worry that reproducing the “scale-making project” of globalization in our analytic discourse might actually undermine the horizontal linkages which are occurring at the lowest level of the scale; as witnessed by activities such as the World Social Forum. I also worry about the issue of comparability. If scales help us create a space in which we can imagine shared interests, a framework for understanding difference is also necessary in order to understand the limits of that commonality. The same question applies to the temporal element of Marcus’ imaginary. To what extent must collaborators share the same orientation towards the future? Must we collaborate with those who share the same ideological goals that we do? At what point does being a “collaborator” become a dirty word?

This question of limits applies as much to traditional outsourcing. As Ritzer and Lair’s discussion shows, it is not always the most cost effective solution. In fact, a study last year found that “outsourced operations are 30 percent more expensive than the top quartile of in-house customer service operations,” suggesting that most companies involved in outsourcing are loosing money. As Ritzer and Lair state at the start of their paper, some scholars argue that one of the primary motivations of outsourcing is the “undermining of local labor’s power vis-a-vis global corporations.” If issues of power and conflict are to some degree part and parcel of the phenomenon known as “outsourcing” do we then weaken the conceptual power of the term if we expand its scope so far as to include phenomenon unrelated to these issues?

Should we outsource anthropology? The answer depends on how well we understand our terms. The forces of globalization allow us to serve as enablers in the process of creating local knowledge, but states, NGOs, and even academic institutions like the AAA continue to work against the creation of horizontal ties in favor of vertical ones that serve to perpetuate those institutions. The very phenomenon of “outsourcing” is profitable, or even when not profitable still advantageous, precisely because of the difficulties in creating such horizontal ties. To answer my own question: I advocate the outsourcing of anthropology to the extent that it serves to undermine the very conditions upon which we are able to even imagine such a possibility.