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ckelty

Christopher M. Kelty is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has a joint appointment in the Institute for Society and Genetics, the department of Information Studies and the Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on the cultural significance of information technology, especially in science and engineering. He is the author most recently of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008), as well as numerous articles on open source and free software, including its impact on education, nanotechnology, the life sciences, and issues of peer review and research process in the sciences and in the humanities.

Receivership: Berkley Anthro or DDR?

I haven’t been blogging about the crisis in the UC system, mostly because excellent blogging is going on elsewhere (see esp. Chris Newfield and others at Remaking the University if you are interested). But when it intersects with anthropology, it warrants our attention. Paul Rabinow forwarded this tantalizing, if brief, note about what’s going on in Berkeley…

The Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley has been in a kind of unofficial receivership for a growing number of years now. The reason I can claim this is that we no longer choose our own chair (while this was always technically true, departmental wishes were traditionally respected and continue to be so in other departments). Not only don’t we get to choose, the results of recent polls have not been disclosed nor those of official votes. The results might be “disruptive” we were told by the chair appointed by the administration. Even the Karzai government goes through the charade of holding elections.

We are now in a kind of Stasi-like moment at Berkeley where e-mail is monitored, lists of attendees to public meetings kept, warning messages sent afterwards, students threatened with expulsion but denied the most elementary protection such as having a lawyer present at their hearings. On the other hand, John Yoo is passionately defended as an example of academic freedom.

Is this going on elsewhere?

Anthropology Journalism HOWTO

It’s like public anthropology week here at SM! Joana and Pal are writing fascinating stuff about engaging beyond academia. And just to keep the discussion going, I wanted to re-post a comment offered by Brian P (science journalist) which is like a HOWTO for anthropology journalism. I hope he doesn’t mind my shameless re-purposing, but it’s some truly excellent stuff. AAA publicity folks, please take note. My comments are interleaved.

If the field wants more attention from the press, here are some ideas:

1) Hire good science writers to write and distribute press releases. Believe me, there are plenty of quality science writers looking for work. Journals could easily pay a few of them to write press releases on the top two or three papers per issue. Current Anthropology does this and I’m grateful for the service. Not many journalists (probably almost zero) read the primary anthro journals, let alone secondary journals in the field. We need to be led to the fountain.

  • “good science writers” might include all those anthropology MAs and PhDs who didn’t end up going into academia for whatever reason. There are a lot of people on this blog alone who just enjoy keeping up with anthropology and who might have the skills to do just this. unfortunately, the part about hiring them seems pretty unlikely. Editors of AAA journals aren’t even paid, to say nothing of science writers. So this task falls to us (see #4 below) and if I were editor of a journal, I would make it a priority to find people willing to do this task on a volunteer basis–or maybe for a free subscription if they happen to be unaffiliated? If Current Anthropology can do it, why can’t the AAA?

2) Post those press releases on Eurekalert.org, which is run by AAAS, and on other services science reporters scan for news, such as Newswise.

  • this seems like a no-brainer. But upon looking, the only alerts are from Current Anthropology. In order to post an alert you need to be a “public information officer” for an organization of some kind. Does the AAA even have a “Public Information Officer”? A subscription to Eurekalert? I might be willing to renew my membership to the AAA if I knew some of the money went to hiring science writers to promote our research on sites like Eurekalert.

3) When preparing press releases, try to relate the work to current events. Make it relevant.

  • I would return here again to my point about temporality. Anthropologists work slowly, but that can be an advantage. It means that a longer term sense of what counts as “relevant” and how to connect current problems that seem new to long-standing structural and cultural transformations is a great way to do exactly what Brian suggests. Just because our work analyzes a time and period that is now outside of the current news-cycle attention span does not mean that it cannot be made relevant to what’s going on today. Figuring out how to stake this claim is intellectually challenging work, not just publicity pandering.

4) If you have the aptitude and inclination to write for a popular audience, DO. Write and submit opinion pieces for national newspapers, Nature, Scientific American, and Science. We read these. New Scientist and Scientific American and Scientific American Mind run articles written by researchers (usually they are heavily edited). It’s cheap labor for magazines to do this, and more and more of them are probably heading in that direction.

  • I’m not sure I fully agree with this one. On the one hand, those who can and want to should, and will. On the other hand, maybe it only means talking with someone who does like to write for a popular audience about current research, or sending alerts to those who do like to write such things. If I got an email box full of eurekalerts about recent research in cultural anthro, I might read some and write about some on SM. As it stands, I just have an email box full of requests to review such research, which means I can’t write about it, even if it’s interesting. I’d be happy to trade in half my peer review requests for “publicize it” requests. The fact that very few of the leading lights of cultural anthropology deign to do exactly such a thing cannot be good for our business.

– Prepare for some disappointment. Yes, some journalists will get it wrong. Sometimes you won’t like our pithy language or our need to strip away the caveats and get to the heart of the issue. Well, that’s the price of admission.

  • well said, sir brian. Indeed, if obscurity and widespread public ignorance of anthropology is what we want, we’ve already got that in spades, so we can feel free to ignore these suggestions and happily avoid any disappointment.

– Let me say it again. FIND WAYS TO MAKE YOUR WORK RELEVANT. What does it tell us about something happening now that’s important to large groups of people? What currency does the work have? I once wrote about some studies of infanticide in baboons – and the researcher was willing to draw inferences about human behavior from his work. That made the work newsworthy and interesting.

  • and let me say it again: cultural anthropology has a different temporality than journalism, even though they often cover very similar topics. So the art of “making it relevant” is also the art of seeing cultural change and significance at different scales, connecting the just-forgotten with the all-too-present. A lot of what cultural anthropology has to offer is the re-framing of persistently polarized debates. Ours is not a logic of discovery, but one of assertion and reorientation.

Buy this Book (Irony included free of charge).



Some scholars write contributions, some adjust the record, some revise it. And some scholars write definitive (and effing long) works. Adrian Johns is one of those scholars. I don’t get as excited about academic books these days as I once did when I spent a lot of time loitering in bookstores (not unrelated issue), but I’m so incredibly excited to have this book in the world I just can’t resist getting all swoony about it. You should too.

Why is there no Anthropology Journalism?

I feel like I hear a lot these days about anthropology’s need to be more engaged, more accessible, more readable and more relevant. There are obviously many different motives behind these concerns, from seeking attention to raising the prestige of the discipline to creating a public anthropology to being true to the concerns and needs of our subjects and collaborators.

But one thing I don’t hear people say is that we need more “Anthropology Journalism.” I mean that primarily on analogy with (or as a subset of) science journalism. It is a very rare experience to open up the Tuesday NY Times and see an article about recent research in anthropology–to say nothing of rags like scientific american, Wired, Discover or the New Scientist. Of all the “news alerts” I get, or the RSS feeds I browse from journalistic outlets, few to none ever report new findings, controversies, or questions coming out of the discipline. And I get more news alerts and RSS feeds than I could possibly read in ten lifetimes.

Two qualifiers: first, I mean linguistic and cultural anthropology specifically. Archaeology gets some love, though usually only when the findings are narrativized in a story of human origins or change, or when something truly rare is discovered. Biological anthropology gets perhaps a bit less love than archaeology, though certainly more than cultural or linguistic, and only when it is clearly identified with another discipline (evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary theory, etc). Jared Diamond, it appears, gets the rest of the attention.

Second, it’s not a total lack. A few weeks back the NY Times magazine ran a story about the Americanization of global mental illness. That article had everything good and bad about science journalism going for it: it reported on recent research, digested it and used to to paint a compelling picture, but it also took liberties with the subtlety of the claims to make an overly broad argument in order to be provocative, and to sell more copies of the journalist’s book. A few years back, Dan Everett got a full profile in the New Yorker. Tracy Kidder recently devoted a whole book to Paul Farmer (though interestingly the publicity only refers to him as a doctor, not an anthropologist). And speaking of Haiti, I’ve heard more anthropologists interviewed in the last two weeks than in the whole of 2009. But basically there is no anthropology journalism to speak of. Why not?

There are a few arguments that are always used to explain why there may be science journalism but no anthropology journalism. The harshest of these is that there is simply no interesting (or objective, or reliable, or novel) anthropology to report on. The argument has a Glenn Beck feel to it, suggesting as it does the decline of western civilization and values and the destruction of all that is Good and Right by the scourge of French philosophy, postmodernism and dissolute tenured radicals. Whatever.

Slightly less annoying is the frequent argument that our writing is inaccessible, jargon-laden, pretentious, or needlessly over-written. This argument fails on the simple grounds that most scientific papers are totally inaccessible to a general audience. Science journalism by journalists trained in science is absolutely essential to communicating what the vast majority of things scientists and engineers are up to today. I won’t defend the wealth of bad writing in anthropology, but nor will I defend it in psychology or chemistry or engineering. Have you read a conference paper in computer science lately? Not only is it likely to be totally inscrutable to you non-computer scientists, but it is also very likely to be extremely poorly written, badly punctuated, and generally abusive of the English language–though very prettily formatted using LaTeX

So let me propose three reasons that people don’t usually seem to offer for why there is no anthropology journalism: Continue reading

Public Participation in the Life Sciences

I’ve been spending the last month organizing a symposium at UCLA called “Outlaw Biology” on public participation in the life sciences. There is much to say here about organizing a mini conference (on which see the recent post by G. Downey that Jay directed us to ), especially one that involves an active participatory component, especially when that involves doing biological experiments of some sort.

Outlaw Biology?
Outlaw Biology?
The whole goal of this symposium was to draw attention to the ways public participation is changing what the life sciences are (whether that means DIY Bio, recreational ancestry genetics, patient advocacy, or ‘open source science’). But what I wanted to draw SM reader’s attention to is the strange way that “public participation” is changing too. Publics are being “organization-ified” in new ways. The easier it becomes to constitute new affinity groups, the more difficult it becomes to be an unaffiliated member of the public. I blame FB and Twitter. But I’m a curmudgeon. Regardless… I’ve written an essay about it and am curious what people think.

Free Speech meets Tourism meets MMORPG

I can’t resist sharing this little news item about a pending suit. It reveals many things that are potentially wrong–or right, depending on what happens–about our world. British Game company Evony is suing an American blogger for defamation in an Australian court. The blogger calls it “libel tourism”– and although it’s perhaps surprising, it’s hardly new given the difference in libel rulings in different nations. Then there is the fact that Evony appears to be a kind of bottom-feeding trailer-trash MMPORG… which as anthropologists we should be immediately drawn to. What would “Coming of Age in Evony” look like? More like Dorothy Allison than Margaret Mead I suspect, but I am not the expert.

The Anthropology of Prisons?

A fellow Texan* and journalist, Michael Berryhill, contacted me recently with a query about whether anthropologists had done much on prisons. He’s writing a book that sounds pretty fascinating:

I’m writing a book about Texas prisons during the 1970s and 1980s, when an upheaval occurred through prison civil rights litigation. I’m interested in what anthropologists have written about the culture of prisons, their slang, their social order and the sense in which they are all part of one culture. Most prison officers, I believe, tend to think there are two cultures: the officer culture (“the good guys”) and the prisoner culture (“the bad guys”). But in reality, inmates and officers are quite interdependent. They share the same language, hours, problems, and often the same attitudes about violence.

I would be particularly interested in any field work that has been done in Southern prisons, and Texas in particular. Texas prisons evolved from Southern slave plantation culture. For the social- psychological perspective, I am using Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, which he recently wrote about in a book, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil”. I consider this an important book in understanding prisons from the point of a view of a social psychologist. I’m wondering which anthropologists have done the equivalent.

I’m sure there must be lots of good stuff out there… in anthro, or in sociology, comparative with other countries, and historical? Can people help Michael out with this?

  • I know, I’m not a Texan anymore… but even one as anti-nationalist as I feels the pang of belonging which it produces 🙂

Another Publishing World is Possible…

There is so much to say about what’s wrong with the publishing industry these days, and so much depressing to report about the state of reading and writing and the circulation of good ideas, that it’s nice to see a clear example of someone trying hard to find another way. John Sundman (aka John F.X. Sundman) is a science fiction writer with a background in truckdriving, volunteer firefighting, development in West Africa. I’ve read one of his three novels (Acts of The Apostles) and (full disclosure for my haters) he’s written a very nice review of by book, the sordid story of which is chronicled on his website. All his books are available for free under CC licenses, as well as (as my friend JFB says) in a flat rectangular form with printed symbols throughout.

John is writing a new novel, his fourth, called Creation Science. But he’s not independently wealthy, so writing and publishing the book is not free, regardless of its form. Fortunately, there is Kickstarter. For years I’ve been hearing people talk about alternative business plans for publishing, art, movies or music. This is it: a platform where people can pitch projects, have people pledge money to them, and if the funding level is met, the funds are released. There’s no mechanism to monitor whether the project is completed… but pledging a fistful of dollars doesn’t hurt anyone. Good old-fashioned risk-sharing. If you think John’s novel sounds like something that should be written, then pledge away. If you like Cory Doctorow’s books (who is also running a similar experiment in self-publishing), you will probably like Sundman’s as well.

But at the very least: think about what he’s doing. This isn’t vanity publishing. Well it is, but it relies on a pool of people who are willing to feed someone’s vanity. But that’s what the mainstream publishing industry is, except instead of vanity, it feeds on raw exploitative power. We have the technology, we don’t need to go back and read Marx again… just stop and think about it.

John is offering different levels of funding: you can pledge just a little ($5) and get a pdf. That’s basically a donation. Or you can pledge $17 and get a signed copy of the book. That’s a steal. Or you can pledge $750 and get “a souvenir pack of nifty stuff from my Creation Science archives, including my original notebooks, copies of correspondence with my editor, one-of-a-kind mockups, etc. After Creation Science has outsold Harry Potter, you’ll be able to sell this on Ebay for a fortune.” That’s hilarious, and not totally insane.

There are other projects like kickstarter, but none, so far as I can tell that are directed at a scholarly audience in any particular discipline. Imagine what a tool like this might look like for scholarly publishing. Imagine a journal run this way, for example. Topics or collections of research are proposed, along with a funding goal, projects that get funded have money to pay for editorial work, copyediting, promotion, maybe even on-demand publishing of the work. At the very least, it’s an easy way to go open access. Anti-OA people like the publishing staff of the AAA always wave the “pay-to-publish” bogeyman at anyone who argues that our work should be freely available (“OMG. It will cost you $9000 per article, we can’t do that!”). So bypass them. Start your own edited volume and raise what you think you’d need to pay someone to edit and manage it (hey you, yes I’m talking to you, the assistant professor trying to get tenure, you end up doing all that work FOR FREE anyways, what do you have to lose here?). Use your AAA Membership fees to contribute to other people’s edited projects that you think deserve to be published and read. It could engage the population of people who care about your work most. It’s an alternative to conventional grant-writing etc.

But even more than that, it could transform peer review and quality-monitoring. Currently Kickstarter is “invitation only” whatever that means. Imagine a scholarly version in which rather than it being “inivitation only” one has to constitute a mini-editorial board of respected scholars (for whatever value of ‘respected’) who would sign off on a project, peer review it and stamp it with a seal of approval (we do this for free already, or at most for $350 in books). My mind reels with the possibilities this has for improving the sorry state of scholarly publishing today. Kickstarter probably isn’t the right forum for this. In fact, I know it isn’t. But some enterprising people from the university press world could get together and make something like this happen right (hint hint). It could even be a consortium of existing presses, if they could solve the collective action problem of saving themselves from extinction. In fact, they might want to check into Kickstarter’s business model: they get 5% of successful projects. In other words, Step 3: Profit!

SCA’s Bateson Book Prize Winner

Last year the Society for Cultural Anthropology announced the creation of the Gregory Bateson Book Prize for the best work of “ethnographic analysis and anthropological thought from any disciplinary tradition.” And the winner is…

Barry F. Sauder’s CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive Cutting Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2008.

For those who don’t know about it yet, this book is amazing. It’s hand’s down the best medical anthro book I’ve read in a while, and Saunders is erudite and witty and creative with the material and the questions he explores. It’s part detective story, part ethnography of work, part media anthropology and good all over.

The shortlist avowedly does not suck either… except for one book by some asshole who studies nerds… I have no idea what posessed the prize committee to include it.

Jessica Cattelino, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke)

Gayle Greene, Insomniac: A Memoir (California)

Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China
(California)

Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke)

The New Persistence of Memory: The Language and Popular Culture in Africa Archive

Some readers here may have seen my review of Johannes Fabian’s recent books, which are linked to a site he co-created with Vincent de Rooij called The Language and Popular Culture in Africa Archive. It’s a great small collection of original texts, translations and commentaries, curated with scholarly care, and representing hard to find and valuable resources. What’s more, even though it is a small-scale project, it was one of the first open access publications in anthropology, and could continue in this fashion if there were interested people.

Fabian wrote to me recently concerned about the future of this archive, highlighting several issues that I think we will all face in the near future:

As you may have noticed in my email signature below the address of our LPCA archive has changed (because of some reorganization at the University of Amsterdam). The old address that appeared in publications so far will get you there for a while but probably not forever. One of the vagaries of presence on the net. Also I say “our” archive because it has been a truly collaborative effort with Vincent de Rooij, a former student and a linguist-cum-anthropologists whose dissertation was about Katanga Swahili. He designed, maintained, and edited the website meticulously. And he did this for almost 10 years without any institutional funding or even academic credit, on his own time. This has become untenable for me but, more importantly, he has turned to other subjects and interests, which is of course entirely legitimate. So the sad news is that LPCA, though it can run, as it were, on autopilot for years as long as it keeps its space on the server, is, if not dead, in suspended animation.

I think such projects are the very lifeblood of anthropology today–far more so than the increasingly sterile walled gardens of the academic journals run by the Publishing Borg and its scholarly society minions. So what should we do to keep them alive:

  1. Volunteers? Is there anyone out there with an interest in and focus on popular culture in Africa, african linguistics or swahili who wants to help? This could be an editorial opportunity as well, since there is both the archive and a Journal associated with the project.
  2. How can we improve it, or make it more 2.0-y and social interneterrific without sacrificing what is already there? What’s the right back-end? The journal (Journal of Language and Popular Culture in Africa) could obviously be ported to Open Journal Systems, if someone wanted to do that, whereas the archive materials might be appropriate for Omeka.
  3. How can we make it more “official”– perhaps by assigning DOI numbers (what would a suitable registration agency be?) and so forth to make it findable as a library resource?
  4. Can we leverage the new “open anthropology cooperative” to find people who are interested and committed?
  5. Other suggestions for Johannes and Vincent as to how to make this project survive and grow?

Facebook and Google: Parochialize your Intarnet!

There’s a very nice little article in Wired this month about Facebook’s plans to rule the world. It’s got lots of details about things like Facebook Connect and about the hubris-filled and cocksure Mark Zuckerberg. What got me thinking most, however, was this chestnut:

For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search.

It’s one of those nice journalistic object lessons which seems to sum it all up at the exact moment that all of its assumptions leak out of the edges: that the Web must be one thing, that one must gain knowledge either from machines or people, that our circle of friends is “our” primary source of information, that we use facebook to get information or that its CEO’s vision maps onto its practices; and so forth.

But there is something crystalline about this. There is a change at work here, a kind of parochialization in process. The metrics of trust embodied by Google are a set of ideals grounded in the idea of a vast library, a global brain, “the world’s information” and the Internet as a vast sea of computable texts and actions; those of Facebook are ideals of human contact, facefulness, recognition, mimicry, identity management, constant contact, powerful control over one’s identity, social network and reputation, self-actualization. Google is dominated by an ethic of information openness in which more is better, because it makes it easier to comb through collect, sort and analyze data. The more open data is, the better your analysis of it will be. Facebook is dominated by something like an ethic of “revealed preferences”–the only information that matters is information tied to a autocthonous system that gives it meaning. Parochialize your Internet; re-embody your avatar. On Facebook, everyone knows you’re a beautiful and well-bred dog. On the capitalist side, this all comes down to how your information will be commodified: facelessly and anonymously, but with possible benefit for a general public (though that public is a geo-politically fraught one with fault lines called China and Saudi Arabia) or facefully and behaviorally targeted commodification, with maximum benefit for the social graph you make and belong to. If we want to talk about intentional communities today, let’s start here: with the automatic co-creation of consumer profiles. The war to make our own demography starts here.

Who isn’t on Twitter?

When the American Anthropology Association is on Twitter, that must mean everyone is. But, I ask: is there a Twigital Divide? Should I be writing a grant proposal to study those left behind, tweetless and downtwodden? Clearly the time has come for me to stop not thinking about facebook and start not thinking about Twitter!

Welcome roving blogger Adam Fish

Adam Fish, a PhD student at UCLA is going to be doing a bit of guest blogging here at SM this summer. Adam describes himself as a new media producer and anthropologist of the creative industries. He’s worked as a documentary maker at CurrentTV on issues such as Iraqi and Bhutanese refugees, Native American tourism, Buddhist/Hindu religious land disputes, and the split cities of Belfast and Nicosia, Cyprus. He has promised to give us some insight into that place where economics and activism meet in citizen journalism and participatory culture. He’s travelling and will be in Cyprus, Israel, and Burning Man… blog on, Adam.