But, in case you don’t feel like scrolling right now, how about a couple of nice selections from the AAA response:

We write today to make the case that while we share the mutual objective of enhancing the public understanding of scientific enterprise and support the wide dissemination of materials that can reach those in the public who would benefit from such knowledge (consistent with our association’s mission), broad public access to information currently exists, and no federal government intervention is currently necessary.

Also:

We know of no research that demonstrates a problem with the existing system for making the content of scholarly journals available to those who might benefit from it.

Emphasis mine in both cases.  Take the time to check out the comments, which you can download as a PDF and share with your friends and colleagues (just an idea).  Comments?  Thoughts?

Update: Here is the direct link to the PDF of the AAA comment.

Update II: A few reactions from around the web:

Daniel Lende: American Anthropological Association Takes Public Stand Against Open Access

Dienekes Pontikos: The American Anthropological Association opposes open science

Michael E. Smith: American Anthropological Association joins the dark side of the force (with appropriate imagery)

Update III: For some background on what’s wrong with the RWA, check out this post by Barbara Fister

Update IV: Kristina Killgrove makes an excellent point about grad students who find themselves outside of the system, here.

The other side of the ‘can’ question is one of publicity: behind closed doors someone somewhere within the AAA may be giving the nod to whatever lobbiest we are allied with to oppose (or support) the AAA. Do they have the integrity to tell their membership what they are doing in our name? I am guessing that the answer is ‘no’, simply because any sort of public statement of this sort of back room dealing would immediately raise questions about proper procedure at AAA, which is exactly the topic these informal dealings are attempting  to avoid.

So: can the AAA successfully, publicly, and in a timely fashion announce a policy decision it has made or will we have to wait 8 months for the next AAA meetings and a DOA panel entitled something like ‘HR 3699:  An Important Topic Having To Do With $This_Year’s_Conference_Theme_Branding”?

I’m hopeful, but I’m not holding my breath.

You had to walk a couple of blocks from the convention center to get anywhere interesting, but once you did Montreal turned out to be delovely. When I told a European friend of mine how much I liked it he nodded his head and gave me a smile that indicated that I was beginning to realize what he’d known all along: “This is the best city in North America” he told me. Frankly, I’m ready to believe it. It seems unfair to characterize Montreal as a mix of other things rather than the carrier of its own unique should, but that is the language I find to describe it: The architecture looks like Paris and Chicago got smushed together, the lively pedestrian neighborhoods look like someone took Manhattan and stretched it out just enough that it could breathe. Catholic monumentalities look like someone tried to build Ancien Regime France in the middle of Iroquois country. Which, I guess, is exactly what happened.

Seriously, though, the term ‘meatgasm’ is not hyperbole. It seemed to be everywhere in Montreal. The local cuisine’s mix of French elegance (read: fry everything) and North American hunting meant pretty much everything seemed on offer. The exception was greens. I suppose that when you live that far north in a colony settled by people who think ‘flavor’ means ‘butter’ you’re not going to get the salad as an elaborated cultural form. Ditto with spices.

And then there was China town, which was like some sort of Stanislaw Lem short story: complete with Chinese gates, but filled with Vietnamese restaurants, which were in fact all run by Chinese people speaking southern dialects with small figures of Guan Yu and Guanyin perched over the cash register.

I may seem overly focused on food — I’ve been accused of this in the past, folks — but it was unfortunately the only reason I had to leave the convention center. As we continue on with the post-game coverage, feel free to let me know what of Montreal you saw when you were there. I’m hoping especially more coverage of Occupy stuff as we move forward.

So consider this an open thread: beyond the AAAs themselves, what did you think of Montreal?

This is boring!

Why do you have to talk for so long?

You’re out of time, so I’m outta here.

Can’t we just download the powerpoint?

Yes folks, you all know what I’m talking about: professors bitching and moaning about having sit listen to read conference papers.

What’s that? You thought I was talking about students complaining about our teaching? Funny you should mention that: when we’re the ones talking, they’re the ones who lack attention spans, are insufficiently focused on their research, and don’t value the importance of old-fashioned, pre-internet forms of Real Communication. But when we’re in the audience they’re the ones who are boring and under-rehearsed.

Now that AAAs are almost upon us, I think it is time to take up again the banner of the well-prepared, well-written, well-presented conference paper and defend it against the hordes of insurgent Pecha Kuchaologists and tenured, cynical silverbacks.

To be sure, lecturing is hardly the ideal form of pedagogy. And we get a lot less well-prepared, well-written, well-presented conference papers than we are entitled to. But this doesn’t take away from the fact that in principle reading out loud is one of the best communication tools we humans have.

Talking to someone face-to-face is an extraordinarily powerful way to communicate — it’s like we’ve spend thousands of years slowly engineering ourselves to be able to do it or something. And reading a prepared, rhetorically powerful document is in many respects the best way of talking face-to-face: a clear message, crafted phrases, no ifs ands or buts.

Listening to read texts — especially academic read texts — can be exhausting. The amount of information that can be crammed into a 20 minute paper is actually pretty enormous. It doesn’t have to be, but it can be. Academic papers are especially exhausting because we imagine our audiences are highly trained professionals who know how to think, listen, and pay attention. We ask more out of our audience because we believe they are capable of giving it to us. Those three seconds in the Matrix before Keanu Reeves opens his eyes and says “I know Kung Fu”? That’s what I’m talking about.

If you are an academic and you can fit everything you need to say about your into 20 slides in 20 seconds, then you need to learn to think longer thoughts. For truelies.

Let’s face it: the reason that read papers suck is that people suck at reading them. We don’t teach oral presentation the way we should, we don’t create opportunities for our students to practice speaking in public, and — amazingly — we don’t value or take seriously the important opportunity that conferences present. All scholarship is a dialogue, and conferences are literally so. They are the center, not the periphery, of our engagement with others.

So this AAA season, do everyone a favor:

write a killer 7 page paper that you have lavished love on.

read it out loud and make sure it takes 20 minutes to deliver.

edit it for clarity.

repeat those last two steps three more times.

If you are a shy speaker, get totally trashed on tequila before your talk so you’ll be more outgoing.

…

no just kidding about that last one.

good luck and… see you at Montreal!

With the annual American Anthropological Association annual meetings just around the corner in November, it’s time to start priming the pump with some topics for us to kvetch about in Montreal. We all talk constantly, for instance, about how for-profit publishing is taking over anthropology. But how bad is it really? What does a bird’s eye view of the journal publishing industry reveal? Jason answered this question by taking 75 of the most commonly read anthropology journals and seeing who was involved in publishing them. The take-away? Roughly 66% of our top journals are being run and published by Big Content, while only a third are under the control of non-for-profit publishers.

Where do these numbers come from? Jason got the list of 75 journals from the Thompson Reuters journals citation database, which measures the ‘impact factor’ of various journals. Although these rankings have not been a big deal to sociocultural anthropologists, they do matter in many other disciplines, and so this is as good a place to start as any. From there Jason pretty much just poured himself a big cup of coffee (or maybe something else?) and then tracked down who was involved in publishing each journal. He counted any for-profit involvement in publishing, so even though the American and British anthropology associations (the AAA and the RAI) are non-profit, their publishers Wiley-Blackwell is, and their journals got chalked up in the ‘for profit’ category.

One of the great, if slightly scary, things that Jason does with this chart is predict Wiley’s next move: if it really wanted to take over the world, it would buy Sage.

After reading Jason’s post, you might feel that anthropology’s publishing situation is like the last minute of Return of the Jedi, with Jason Jackson’s highly realistic synthetic hand being reattached by a medical droid while Wiley Fett spirits Tom Boellstorff back to Tatooine encased in a block of carbonite. You’d be right — there is still lots of hope in the situation, but it is up to us to see it through.

The reason is simple: as much as we like to bitch and moan about the evils of Wiley-Blackwell, Sage, Elsevier, and so on, the simple fact of the matters is that a lot of these publishers have a remarkably enlightened approach to open access. Most of them, for instance, will allow you to post publisher’s proofs (the final draft version of your article) on your website or institutional repository. When we read the table of contents for the latest American Anthropologist but can’t download the article, it is only most Wiley’s fault — if the actual author just posted their PDFs of the article online, we’d be set.

Of course, Big Content is still sucking our lifeblood from us money-wise, but it is important to recognize that they have opened the door to us to make our work available to, well, everyone — but only if we take the time to do so. They are betting that we won’t. Our greatest challenge going forward is to find ways to make sure that we do. What sort of institutions and incentives can do this? That, currently, is the million-dollar question.

Social science research isn’t on the firmest ground in these days of economic malaise, but it’s not like this news is exactly exploding into the headlines across the nation.  Funding cuts, like the recent “trimming” of the Fulbright program,* seem to take place somewhat under the radar.   The same can be said of the recent debates about the value of social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) sciences that took place about a month ago in a congressional hearing on June 2, 2011 (this link has PDFs of the introductory statements and the testimony of all the witnesses).  The social sciences face an uphill battle, in part, because some folks see them as mere “soft sciences” that do not merit public support.  The House panel subcommittee meeting was about assessing the relative merit of the social sciences and how federal funding should or should not be allocated to researchers.  Did you hear about this?  Well, I didn’t–at least not until just a few days ago.  Funny what can happen in the middle of the summer, isn’t it?  Anyway, here’s a recap of what went down according to a summary from the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA):

The goal of this hearing is not to question whether the social, behavioral, and economic sciences produce interesting and sound research, as I believe we all can agree that they do. I come from a social science background. I have a degree in political science and economics. Rather, the goal of our hearing is to look at the need for federal investments in these disciplines, how we determine what those needs are in the context of national priorities, and how we prioritize funding for those needs, not only within the social science disciplines, but also within all science disciplines, particularly when federal research dollars are scarce.

Brooks’ language sounds cool, rational, and impartial.  However, according to journalist Jeffrey Mervis:

Brooks may have been pulling his punches. In comments to ScienceInsider after the hearing, Brooks expressed serious doubts about the value of the social sciences. The freshman legislator said he “understands the value of basic research” because his constituents in and around Huntsville, Alabama, make up “one of, if not the most, highly educated districts in the sciences.” Brooks did say that “my priorities would be to protect basic research in the sciences as much as possible, even to the extent of cutting entitlements, in order to generate enough funding for basic research.” But his definition of the term “basic research” turns out to be synonymous with the so-called hard sciences, and to exclude the social sciences.

Gutman, for his part, argued in defense of NSF funding for social science research.  From the COSSA report: “[Gutman] provided many examples of how SBE research has served the nation including research on human actions and decision making, terrorism, artificial speech, matching markets and kidney transplants, spectrum auctions and the importance of protecting social networks in disaster situations.” Elfeinbein, who is a psychologist by training, also provided testimony about the value and applicability of of social science research.  She discussed the applicability of her own research for business, the military, medicine, and education.  When asked why SBE science is important for science in general, the Federal government, and the American taxpayer, Elfeinbein stated (from the PDF of her actual testimony):

The social and behavioral sciences in general are important because technology, health, industry, and politics are ultimately in the hands of people–who behave rationally and irrationally.  The learning and implementation of all other sciences depends on the human factor.

That is certainly a point that many anthropologists would agree with.  Up next was the anthropologist in the crowd, Peter Wood.  His position was that “the SBE sciences should not be x-ed out completely from the budget of the NSF or other federal agencies.” However, Wood did say that he thinks a small percentage of SBE funding goes to what he called “trivialities and politicized programs.” Wood laid out a “triage” approach to cutting the SBE NSF budget, which he explained in more detail a few days later in a post he wrote for the Chronicle of High Ed called “How to Save the Social Sciences.”  Wood’s first point was that there is plenty of funding sources that are non-governmental, so NSF funding isn’t all that necessary.  His second point: there are already too many SBE PhD’s, and the NSF is making the situation worse by continuing to fund them.  His third point of this triage is where things start getting a little dicey.  Wood advised the panel to:

Pay attention to the rise of anti-scientific ideologies within SBE disciplines. In my field of anthropology, for example, the recent controversy over the attempt by the Executive Board of American Anthropological Association to jettison “science” from the AAA’s mission statement is a pertinent example. Should NSF fund “social science” research in fields that reject the paradigm of scientific investigation?

Since “social, behavioral and economic sciences research does not fit the conditions that define it as a ‘public good,’” [...] it should receive no funding from the Federal government, particularly NSF. She indicated that Foundations were a source that SBE scientists could use and since Smith, Marx, and Keynes all conducted their research without government support, so could today’s economists and other social scientists.

On July 12, the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued a press release that speaks to these very issues:

More than 140 scientific societies and universities today sent a letter urging U.S. policymakers, in their need to cut spending, to avoid singling out specific programs—such as the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences—and to refrain from bypassing independent peer review.

The letter, routed to key lawmakers who are preparing to debate the Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill for fiscal year 2012, opposes any attempts to eliminate or substantially reduce funding for particular research programs. Defunding specific grants or entire scientific disciplines “sets a dangerous precedent that, in the end, will inhibit scientific progress and our international competitiveness,” the group warned.

While the Society for Anthropological Sciences is a part of the letter, the American Anthropological Association is curiously absent.  I’m not sure why.  Regardless, it would probably behoove the anthropological community to become a more active–and vocal–part of these discussions.  Silence, in this case, is certainly not golden.

I probably would have had to change my research topic if I hadn’t received a Fulbright dissertation grant to come to Taiwan. The Fulbright program was founded by Senator William Fulbright in 1946, and was initially paid for by selling off war surplus. This makes the current situation all the more depressing. The following chart shows where the current debt comes from.

As you can see, half the debt comes from a combination of Bush-era tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That means that the Fulbright program, originally paid for out of war surplus, is now being cancelled to pay for war debt.

As Maura Elizabeth Cunningham puts it in her post on the China Beat:

Programs like the Fulbright-Hays grants aren’t just about supporting individual scholars; they have a larger mission of promoting work that collectively helps all of us contextualize the world we live in and recognize how it has come to look the way it does. By not providing the funding necessary to support this year’s crop of applicants, the government is implying that such work isn’t important, that we can exist in a global community but don’t need to understand it.

Unlike HTS, the Fulbright program and NEH fund important research which I believe genuinely contributes to our understanding of the world. It is depressing to see our reckless involvement in two unfunded wars now threatening these programs.

So I go to Anthrosource. Anthrosource is the online portal which all AAA members get access to which lets us read all the journals in our field — in fact, it is the main ‘member benefit’ for AAA members. The bad old days of waiting for a copy of Cultural Anthropology to be mailed to me is over, now I can read it on AnthroSource for free immediately!

Except that the latest edition of Cultural Anthropology is not on Anthrosource. Was @AAApubs wrong about the article being online? As it turns out, no: Wiley’s website is selling the current issue of Cultural Anthropology, so their customers can read the article immediately. Which doesn’t include the tens of thousands of actual anthropologists who use Anthrosource to access our journals.

So I think: maybe it just takes a couple of hours for the new journal to appear on Anthrosource. I go home, get up the next morning, and find an email from Wiley announcing that the new issue of Cultural Anthropology is online. Has everything been refreshed and uploaded? No. The article is still only available to Wiley subscribers.

I’m hopeful that this is a temporary problem and that I am just unusual in not wanting to wait 48 hours for the Internet to get itself all set up. But even if this problem is solved quickly, what does it mean to our association that our own members cannot read the journals that Wiley is flogging to its subscribers? What began as a terrible idea of outsourcing our publications to a for-profit company has turned into a situation where we are now strangers in our own house.

There’s no better way to summarize the situation than the link that’s included in @AAApubs twitter description. It ends with a URL addressed
http://www.wiley.com/go/anthrosource. When you click on the link you are directed to a page at Wiley that reads: “sorry there is no information available for this journal.”

AAA papers matter more than publications: AAA papers are the consommé of our academic inventory of soups and stocks. They are short, so it is easier for people to digest them than publications. Your presentation is not even mostly about the paper, but mostly about you as a person — whether you are ‘smart’ or ‘interesting’ or a ‘comer’ or not. Articles do not allow people to size you up in this way. And, realistically, even in very small sessions, more people may closely attend to your paper than ever get around the scrutinizing your articles. Above all, at AAA you make a flesh-and-blood on people, people who may later be interviewing you for jobs, evaluating you for tenure, or giving you research money. The bad news is that for some reason we treat these papers as the least important form of scholarly publication when, sociologically speaking, they are the most important. The good news is that you now know this while all the in the room do not, so now you have the advantage.

Take it seriously: don’t be a total moron and “write your paper on the plane”. You don’t get to be good at anything by doing it sloppily at the last minute, over and over again. Take the time you need to work on it. This will be easy because…

Seven pages, twenty minutes: AA papers are 20 minutes long, more or less. It takes three minutes to read a page of double-spaced 12 point Times New Roman. Your paper should be 7 pages long. Not 8 pages, and not 6 pages unless you then proceedeth to 7. Don’t come to the meetings with a 50 page dissertation chapter and expect the thing to magically cut itself down to 7 pages magically before your eyes as you stand at the podium during your session.

Think about your evidence: qualitative data takes time and space to layout, which is why anthropologists write long-form monographs. In most cases participant-observation is resistant to tabulation, and I can guarentee no one at AAAs is going to ask you what P is for your study. This means that you will have the freedom to make whatever claims you want in your paper regardless of the quality and amount of your evidence.

With 7 pages to work with, you have roughly 1.5 pages to introduce and conclude and 4 pages to make your case. This is a ridiculously compressed amount of space/time. The good news is that it focuses you to figure out what your point actually is and allows you to dwell on the broad relevance of your findings. The bad news is that you must resist spending four pages just describing where your fieldsite is. Remember: because of length, evidence in AAA papers is decorative and exemplary, a promissory note for the whole story.

I’d suggest either analyzing one single event or case study, or else focusing on three things/conclusions/themes and spending a page and change on each of them. Keep it tight, and remember to include only the details you need to make your point. This will probably be challenging because 1) it is too hard for you to be reductive due to your holistic, particularizing impulses or 2) you have no idea what you actually want to say. Regardless, remember that the evidence is there to make a point, and that your presentation must be point driven.

Read your paper out loud: Remember, a AAA paper is a performance the same way someone on stage doing The Vagina Monologues is a performance. The paper is your script. Read it aloud for twenty minutes, and make it as engaging as The Vagina Monologues except (probably) with less vaginas and more anthropology.

Many people — mostly those with no background in the performing arts — argue that you should never ‘read your paper’ because doing so is ‘boring’. This is just stupid talk. You know what’s boring? Someone going off script telling us what their paper says when it’s right there in front of them delivering an oral presentation full of “um”s and “I guess my point is”s. If you paid fifty bucks to go see Vagina Monologues and the actor stopped halfway through and decided to improvise their own monologue loosely based on the actual monologue, would you give them tenure?

Of course, when you read your paper you should not suck at doing it. Write the paper as if it were a monologue instead of dense academic prose — no one wants to read dense academic prose, much less listen to it. Read it as if it were a monologue. Project, stand up straight, make eye contact, read at a reasonable pace, all that kind of stuff. You could even try rehearsing before you perform if you were feeling really ambitious. In fact, the best way to present would be to just memorize your talk so that you don’t need a paper, but this is usually more trouble than it’s worth.

Revise: 7 pages is totally nothing. Revise constantly. In fact, why don’t you pound out your 7 page draft now, let it sit for a couple of months, and then pick it up a month or two before AAAs? I guarantee it will result in a better finished product. I’ve already written my first draft of my AAA paper.

In sum, AAA papers are so important, and yet so terrible that it should be easy to produce a good one: with the bar this low, how much trouble will you have jumping over it? Do the world a favor and reduce the suck quotient at AAA panels by following these simple pieces of advice today, so we can have a better world tomorrow.

A

Activism

Advocacy

Aesthetics

Affect

Africa

Agency

Aging and Life Course

Agriculture and Agrarian Systems

Americas

Anthropology

Applied Anthropology

Archaeology

Architecture/Built Environment

Art and Material Culture

Asia

Australia and New Zealand

B

Bioarchaeology

Biocultural

Biological Anthropology

Body

Borders

Bureaucracy

C

Capitalism

Caribbean

Catholicism

Central America

Central Asia

Ceramics

Change

Children and Youth

China

Christianity

Circulation

Citizenship

Class

Collaboration

Colonialism and Post colonialism

Commodification

Community

Computers, Science and Technology

Conflict and War

Consciousness

Conservation

Consumer Behavior and Design Anthropology

Consumerism

Contact Language

Cultural Politics

Cultural Resource Management

Cultural Transmission

Culture

D

Deaf

Death

Democracy

Demographics

Development

Diaspora

Difference

Digital and Virtual Anthropology

Disability

Discourse

Discrimination

Discussant

Diversity

E

Eastern Africa

Eastern Asia

Eastern Europe

Ecology and Environment

Economic Anthropology

Education

Embodiment

Engaged Anthropology

Engagement

Environment

Epistemology

Equity

Ethics

Ethnicity

Ethno history

Ethnography and Ethnology

Europe

Evolution

Experience

Expertise

F

Family

Feminism

Feminist Anthropology

Festschrift

Fieldwork

Folklore

Food and Nutrition

Food Security

Forensic Anthropology

G

Gender

Genetics and Genomics

Globalization

Governance

Governmentality

Guatemala

H

Health

Heritage

Historic Preservation

Historical Anthropology

Historical Archaeology

History

History of Anthropology

HIV/AIDS

Human Growth and Development

Human Rights and Advocacy

I

Identity

Imagination

Immigrants

Immigration

Inclusion

India

Indigeneity

Indigenous Peoples

Inequality

Innovation

Institutions

Interdisciplinary

Islam

J

Japan

Justice

K

Kinship and Families

Knowledge

Korea

L

Labor and Work

Landscape and Spatial Studies

Language and Cognition

Language Ideologies

Latin America

Latin America and the Caribbean

Laughter

Law

Learning

Legal and Political Anthropology

Linguistic Anthropology

Linguistics

Linguistics – Descriptive and Comparative

Literature and Poetics

M

Markets

Material Culture/Materiality

Maya

Media and Journalism

Medical Anthropology

Melanesia

Memory

Methodology

Micronesia

Middle Africa

Middle East

Migration, Immigration and Diasporas

Military

Mobility

Modernity

Morality

Motherhood

Museum Anthropology

Museums

Music and Sound

N

Narrative

Nation

Nationalism

Native Americans

Neoliberals

NGO

North America

Northern Africa

Northern Europe

O

Oceania

Organizational Anthropology

P

Paleoanthropology

Participation

Pedagogy

Performance

Performance and Festivals

Personhood

Place

Policy

Political Ecology

Political Economy

Political Subjectivity

Politics

Polynesia

Popular Culture

Post Socialism

Poverty

Power

Practice

Primatology

Protest

Psychological Anthropology

Public

Public Anthropology

Public Health

Public Policy

Publics

Q

Queer

R

Race and Racism

Reciprocity

Reflexivity

Refugees

Religion and Cosmology

Representation

Reproduction

Research/Research Methods

Resistance

Rhetoric and Communication

Rituals and Life Cycle Events

Rural Anthropology

S

Schooling

Science

Security

Semiotics

Sexuality

Sign Language

Skeletal Biology

Social Change

Social Justice

Social Movements

Socialites

Sociolinguistics

South America

South Asia

South-East Asia

Southern Africa

Southern Asia

Southern Europe

Sovereignty

State/s

Subjectivity

Sustainability

T

Teacher Education

Teaching

Technology

Theory

Tourism

Tradition

Transitional Justice

Translation

Trauma

U

Undergraduate

United States

Urban

Urban Anthropology

Urban Space

V

Value

Violence

Visual Anthropology

W

War

Western Africa

Western Asia

Western Europe

Work

World

Writing

This won’t work for several reasons: First, because of my position on the earth, it is probably not Valentine’s Day where you are. Second, there is a strong chance that I’m opening the flood gates for endless cynical, bodice-ripping parodies. But I’d still like to give it a shot.

This idea is simple: in the next seven days, for a few thousand words, somewhere public on the Internet, write about why you like anthropology. Then we’ll make the guys at Neuroanthropology do a round up.

Back in the good old days of last month, when #AAAfail was on everyone’s lips, I suggested that we ask anthropology bloggers to provide ‘creeds’ or statements of belief about what anthropology was or should be. I let the idea drop because it seemed sort of dogmatic and unfun to list what you think The Deal is with anthropology. I’m hoping that the Valentine’s Day format will help accomplish a similar thing, but with a little bit of fun thrown in.

So let’s see whether anyone wants to take up the V-Day challenge in the next week and talk about what what anthropology is and why they like — nay, even love — it. Get cracking!

A guest post by Jenny Cool cool {at} usc(.)edu

The elevators I encountered at the 2010 AAAs were for me a kind of ethnographic readymade: those redolent objects and gestures through which “the social world seems more evident…than in the whole concatenation of our beliefs and institutions” (to cop a phrase from David MacDougall, 1999: 3). No doubt many of you made your own observations of the lifts at the Sheraton New Orleans. Hervé Varenne’s post “On an education into elevators” touches on some of the same phenomena I do in describing “impromptu conversations” that broke out in and around these elevators. And others have written more generally on “the anthropology of elevators” (Leslie, D’Costa) Like Varenne, I focus on the social and discursive learning I participant-observed riding the vertical rails at the AAAs.

Here were people negotiating a radically new interface—not alone at their keyboards or mobile devices—but in a pubic place, surrounded by fellow meeting goers. It was a rare opportunity to watch the encounter in a social setting quite unlike others I’d experienced in my research of computer-mediated communication and control.

Max Weber wrote of the “fleeting ‘togetherness’ in streetcar, railroad or hotel” as kin to “every permanent or ephemeral community of interest that derives from physical proximity” (1978: 361). Here it was in vivo and brought to the fore by an unfamiliar “smart” elevator system

For those who haven’t seen the lifts at the New Orleans Sheraton, they run a under centralized system. Rather than traditional “up” and “down” buttons, would-be riders are presented with a keypad and small display. A sign instructs you to enter the floor you wish to go, and step to the car whose number appears on the read-out. Inside, the elevator car offers no controls other than an alarm, door open and close buttons. Floor numbers showing where your elevator will stop light up on inset LED panels that run down the left and right of the doors.

“This is a very totalitarian system,” said a woman in an accent I took to be Brazilian as we stood waiting for an elevator. In terms of user-interaction design, she was right. The system was optimized to do one thing as efficiently as possible—get people to the floors they key in. Yet in doing so, it ignores other practices and possibilities of elevator riding to which people have become accustomed since the introduction of the hydraulic elevator in the mid-19th century. There are other systems for optimizing elevator traffic that don’t require algorithms, that aren’t “smart.” For example, having cars go to different sets of floors (e.g. 1-11 and 12-24), like express trains. While these merely divide the menu, the “smart” system constrains riders’ communication and control more profoundly, in a manner one might well call totalitarian.

The degree to which norms of elevator riding had become habitual and embodied in muscle memory was made clear to me just after I stepped into one of these cars for the first time. As soon as I was in, my body turned subconsciously, first to the right and then the left of the door and my dominant hand reached out feeling it was supposed to push something…but what? When it registered there were no light-up buttons to push, I remembered I had already selected my floor in the lobby. Over three nights and four days at the Sheraton, I watched several others turn and reach for a standard elevator interface that wasn’t there, performing the same pantomime I had.

The “fleeting togetherness” of the elevator car became evident in what I noted as bugs in the system, though technically speaking they could be considered side effects. One evening, a woman hopped in the fairly full car I was riding up in and, after the doors closed, realized her floor was not on the lighted list of stops. I overheard her talking with those around her. “Just get out at the next stop and punch in your floor,” someone said, “We’ll hold the doors.” Then the person who was getting out next asked what floor she wanted, saying, “I’ll punch it in, you don’t need to get out.”

That was a darn good work around and a lovely, crystallized example of Weber’s ephemeral community. Together these riders generated and published a novel solution on-the-fly, a user-hack to get around the “smart” system’s neglect of a great many of the possibilities and practices (error and use cases) entailed and embodied in elevator riding in everyday, life. To me, that’s a smart system.

I happened across several such bugs on these elevators. There were the people who wanted to get off and go back to their room when everyone onboard had selected the lobby. They would have to ride all the way down and back, unless our car happened to stop for someone on the way down. If it did, “Was there a stairwell?” they wondered aloud, could they find it? And there were those clearly vexed by the unfamiliar system. For example, my friend ST who pointed out that the old-style controls (the buttons) were locked away behind a chrome panel with instructions to fire fighters to “use key.” That these controls were right there but shut away, as if behind a childproof door, annoyed her considerably. Varenne also reports negative responses to the Sheraton elevators and critiques them as the work of “engineers, backed by powerful corporations, and by unimpeachable discourses about efficiency.”

While it’s true I can’t recall anyone extolling the new elevators, what struck me was a mostly pragmatic, “just figure out how to work it,” adopt and adapt attitude. Sure, some folks waxed critical, like the alleged Brazilian mentioned earlier, but whatever was said, it was not, from what I saw, in any sense addressed to those who’d installed or designed the elevators. The feedback loop didn’t feed back that far.

Instead, everything occurred as if such dramatic changes to everyday interfaces were inevitable. The conjecture “These will soon be everywhere,” I heard many times. Whatever its powers, the fleeting togetherness of the elevator car, which Varenne also notes in terms of “temporary consociates” and “ad hoc congregations” isn’t a polity. It is a more elementary social form which Weber called “the neighborhood,” “an unsentimental brotherhood” that “is by and large oriented toward maintaining the greatest possible distance in spite (or because) of the physical proximity” (1978:360-361).

What interests me in these elevator encounters is the coincidence of physical and temporary proximity. Most riders had no experience of such elevators before the AAAs. Besides being in confined space together, they were also new together, i.e., at the same time. This coincidence, I would argue, is a significant factor in the volume and pitch of discourse and social action precipitated by the Sheraton elevators. It is also what makes this a special case of people encountering a new technology in public.

NOTES

MacDougall, David
”Social Aesthetics and The Doon School,” Visual Anthropology Review, Volume 15, Issue 1, pages 3-20, March 1999. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/var.1999.15.1.3/abstract

Weber, Max
1978 Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 1. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. http://books.google.com/books?id=pSdaNuIaUUEC&printsec

It is easy to see why. Being an activist requires two main ingredients: 1) moral certainty (that something in the world is wrong) and 2) empirical confidence (of the changes necessary to make things better). Postmodernism (to a first approximation) is characterized by 1) a suspicion of foundational moral thinking and 2) not a very robust theory of causation. Postmodernism, in brief, is inimical to intervention.

Intervention in the world by anthropologists — whether it be ‘critical’ or ‘applied’ — is typically grounded by a firm belief that you know what is going on. Indeed, the most famous cases of overreaching political planning (think Robespierre) were a result of _too much_ faith in Science. While Real Scientists can have some sort of beef with ‘critical’ anthropologists, it will have to be a complicated and well-thought out beef about the relationship between scientific knowledge, civic participation, fair dealings with research communities, and ‘broader impacts’ (to use the language of the NSF) over research. But it cannot be a simple one that anthropology ‘ought not get involved’, at least not if one wants to avoid taking the untenable position that urban planners are deeply unethical when they embrace the value judgment that local communities deserve functioning traffic lights and graded roads. Neither can it be an epistemological one that critical anthropologists have no theory of truth, causation, and so forth, since in fact such a theory is necessary (to a first approximation) for any attempt at intervention.

In short, a commitment to positive knowledge unites critical anthropologists and Real Scientists against postmodernism, not the other way around.

A good example of this can be seen in the exchange between Bob Scholte and Steven Tylor in the pages of Critique of Anthropology (volume seven issue one if you want to look it up) in 1987. Scholte is a bit of a forgotten figure in anthropology, a leftist and philosophically-inclined anthropologist who was poised to become a major figure in the field until he passed away unexpectedly at a young age. His review of Writing Culture — a key postmodernist text in anthropology — was thus fairly influential in its time, and was a summary of white the older generation of Marxist scholars who came up in the sixties thought about the newer postmodern trends of the eighties.

For Scholte, postmodernism is not a fellow fighter against Truth and Objectivity, but rather a threat to it. A postmodern approach to the poetics of a text is insufficient to normatively ground anthropological critique. Scholte finds

an exclusive appeal to aesthetics and poetry politically inadequate. On the one hand, there is no guarantee that the ’Mephistophelian urge to power’ cannot also infect the poet. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that poetry by definition generates positive or desirable political consequences.

This is, in fact, not a problem of postmodernism but of the Geertzian interpretive anthropology out of which it grew:

spinning textual tapestries inspired by native designs does not, of course, guarantee a moral center. In fact, the latter threatens to disappear from anthropological praxis altogether. And there is the rub. Politics may become merely academic – literally so. Specifically, the politics of interpretation in the academy threatens to draw a ’cordon sanitaire’ (p. 257) around the interpretation of politics in society. That, I would argue, is the greatest danger of symbolic anthropology and – by implication – its literary turn.

Thus Scholte, like some of the Real Scientists involved in #AAAfail, finds the politics of political correctness and academic posturing — the “politics of interpretation in the academy” — totally unappetizing.

While Scholte’s review — like much of his writing — tends to ramble, Tylor’s response does a much better job of summarizing Scholte’s charge against him than Scholte himself. Scholte, he writes, “faults the book for avoiding politics and praxis, for failing to confront the political realities that make the context of its own Mandarin concerns with literary effect” and being, in essence, “a cowardly retreat into a feckless literary aestheticism”.

Tylor was in 1987 nothing if not a poster boy for the more caricatureable branch of postmodernism, and his response to Scholte does not disappoint. “Where Bob finds these essays unpolitical, or evasive in their politics, or unmindful of political contexts,” he writes, “they strike me as being excessively political, too trapped in the discourse of RAYT – of power, politics, reason, epistemology, praxis, critique, and normative import.”

Tylor continues to use the term RAYT — get it?!? — throughout the review, taking Writing Culture to task because the chapters in it “still spin their tales cocooned by the security of representational discourse. Still unmetamorphased, they do not burgeon into light, nor challenge the dark hegemony of politics and epistemology, but presuppose it even in the ironies that enshroud their purposes.” As a result they “preserves the myth of a privileged discourse that founds or grounds all the others.”

In contrast, “post-modernism grants no priority to any discourse. It aims to deconstruct the divisions that give the illusion of separate, hierarchically ordered discourses… It is a way of using these discourses against themselves neither in order to re-hierarchize them nor even to overcome them, but to realize that parodic potential which is their fullest implication.”

This is clearly not a brief for intervention. In fact, Tylor seems to find the idea of intervention in the world ludicrous: “Who now believes that politics or science works any positive transformation? Anthropology, modem science, and history have all conspired to teach us to disavow this hubris of the modem age,” he writes. Even worse, critical anthropology leads to “boredom” since “those complementary modes of demystification called symbolic anthropology and critical anthropology” leads to a “dialectic that mystifies the past and projects an unreachable future that always escapes final totalization in the clash of conflicting interests – until – by this prattling parabasis lulled into slumber, succumbed to the rhythm of their rupture and continuity we are succussed into some new succession RAYTING still.”

It is not clear what Tylor’s solution is — except perhaps that he is beyond looking for one. It is useful, I think, to be reminded that ‘postmodernism’ can be something more than a term of abuse. And as this exchange makes clear, it is not automatically aligned with ‘critical anthropology’ in the fight against ‘Real Science’. After all, one of the ideas behind many brands of Marxism is that it is ‘science’. Too often we assume that we remember what the alignment of forces were in a debate, or we simply don’t learn the specifics of a debate at all because ‘we all know what someone said’. I think it is important that there is some precision and history is necessary in debates about our discipline.