The time is gone when anthropologists could find solace in the claim that our main civic duty–and the justification for our public support–was the constant reaffirmation that the Bongobongo are “humans just like us.” Every single term of that phrase is now publicly contested terrain, caught between the politics of identity and the turbulence of global flows. Too many of the Bongobongo are now living next door, and a few of them may even be anthropologists presenting their own vision of their home societies, or studying their North Atlantic neighbors. The North Atlantic natives who reject them do so with a passion. Those who do accept them do not need anthropologists in the welcoming committee.
–Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations (2003:137)

Trouillot is then outlining a vision of anthropological duties and risks, include making native voices more full interlocutors, identifying the ultimate targets of anthropological discourse, and publicizing the stakes of anthropological exchange.

To what degree do Open Access efforts–specifically Hau–move us in that direction?

Allow me to first state that I am very encouraged by Hau and its potential. I also do not want to take away from the many interesting comments. However, from that discussion, I am left wondering:

1. As Rex identified in his initial post, “I don’t see a role for indigenous anthropology (i.e. by and for indigenous anthropologists) in this program at all.” David Graeber challenged this, but Rex challenged back–and so it seems the question is still on the table: To what degree might open access also be a place where indigenous anthropologists, native voices, and internal others have a chance to become more full interlocutors in anthropological conversations?

2. Are we “identifying clearly the ultimate listeners,” those Trouillot called “the Sepulvedas of our times” (2003:136)? Hau admirably aims to make “anthropology itself relevant again far beyond its own borders” (2011:viii) and is specifically launched against insularity and triviality. At the same time, the observation of “parochial irrelevance” is followed by lamenting that the Deleuzians, Speculative Realists, Lacanians, and Foucauldians are not taking classic anthropology into account, “a colossal failure of nerve” (2011:x). But are these the Sepulvedas of our times?

3. Trouillot was not talking about Open Access, but he did discuss accessibility: “Media claims notwithstanding, the influence of academic research that could be labeled politically ‘progressive’ has decreased–if only because these works are increasingly inaccessible to lay readers” (2003:137). And so I here wonder–even if every article in American Anthropologist were declared Open Access today–to what degree would it make a difference for the Bongobongo and the Sepulvedas of our times? I do not mean to be too harsh–Trouillot recognized the need for “a technical vocabulary to which research contributes and without which it cannot be sustained” (2003:137, and of course Trouillot’s Global Transformations is rather out-of-reach for many lay readers)–but it is worth thinking about how Open Acess and accessibility could and should interact.

This also seems related to Rex’s analogy to Academia as Music Industry. “Platinum hits” may be rarer, but the irrepentant Sepulvedas of our times keep churning out multi-nationally financed blockbusters.

But what happens when mp3 proliferate, multiple indie labels spring up, and the center falls out of genres like, for instance, hip hop, as they fragment into multiple different audiences and communities? Revenues drop, for one thing, and the publishing industry attempts to litigate or legislate away the new-found freedom that these communities have, attempting to make sharing illegal so that they can continue to profit from the scarcity they are architecting into what was formerly an open system.

For music listeners, rather than publishers, an issue of ‘importance’ arises — how can you tell that the assistant musician in your department is ‘important’ and deserves tenure in an era when platinum hits are getting rarer and rarer? What counts as importance is itself shifting. I can see a number of ways out of this dilemma but whatever route departments chose will require a choice. And standing up and deciding for yourself how to handle something as important as the professional credentialing of the professoriate is a big challenge which requires a lot of confidence in one’s own academic judgement. Which means, of course, that it is the sort of decision that the vast majority of us will hope is made by someone else! But at the end of the day, that is the sort of decision will have to be made.

[I realize the irony of prominently citing American Anthropologist during the Open Access debates--I do end with a call to support Rex's proposal to read and talk about HAU]

–Andre Gingrich, Transitions: Notes on Sociocultural Anthropology’s Present and Its Transnational Potential, December 2010:555

–Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen and Janis Hutchinson, Anthropology as White Public Space?, December 2011:545

I am hoping in these guest posts to examine episodes of how anthropology gets taken–starting with a follow-up to Kerim’s archive on Jared Diamond, and then tackling the Anthropologie Store, the TV series Community, and other instances where anthropology either gives stuff away or gets hijacked. But I’d also like to write about taking anthropology back, in alliance with what Rex proposes around Hau or Matt suggests about the AAA.

As an introduction, I would like to use the two articles above, from the December 2010 and December 2011 issues of American Anthropologist, to assess anthropology’s current position, to evaluate resources and risks.

Andre Gingrich’s article hit the press just as the AAA science and mission statement issue really earned anthropology some great NY Times coverage. If anyone is working on a “careful and balanced history” of the autocritique, please let me know–in the wake of old wounds and new emotions about science, such accountings became nearly impossible. Bad feelings and suspicion persist, and for those in adjacent disciplines, anthropology can now always be dismissed with some lines about how it is “at war with itself” and “got rid of science.” This only exacerbated the way the autocritique had been misused, as Giovanni Da Col and David Graeber argue in the inaugural issue of HAU:

The anthropological auto-critique of the 1980s was made to serve a purpose for which it was never intended. In fact, anthropology has been since its inception a battle-ground between imperialists and anti-imperialists, just as it remains today. For outsiders, though, it provided a convenient set of simplified tag lines through which it was possible to simply dismiss all anthropological knowledge as inherently Eurocentric and racist, and therefore, as not real knowledge at all. (2011:xi)

This debate also proved how much the tag line postmodernism still serves as a convenient device to lump all opponents. Such lumping ignores how accusations of postmodernism tend to conceal more than they reveal about actual positions, and that there were legitimate critiques of normative science from Marxism and feminism long before–and that did not depend upon–this so-called postmodern critique.

Andre Gingrich could also have hardly known of all the other minor and major assaults in the works for anthropology in 2011, including the backlash from the “F— You Republicans” e-mail as a minor ambush and then the Florida Governor’s declaration of a no-anthropology-needed zone, which together with the heightened threats to educational funding and continued use of “economic crisis” to discipline and informalize academic labor, amounted to a major assault. However, Gingrich did have pertinent and rather prophetic words of advice for navigating these episodes:

Opponents will not remain inactive. In times of crisis, it is not difficult to predict that some forces will emerge that will argue either for an intensification of anthropology’s applied subordination and instrumentalization at the service of other needs and fields or for anthropology’s radical downsizing–or for both, as one step toward its dissolution. (2010:558-559)

Nevertheless, as of December 2011 there were good reasons to be hopeful. In contrast to the December 2010 science-in-anthropology incident, the AAA swiftly responded to Florida Governor Scott; anthropology bloggers like Daniel Lende and students like Charlotte Noble provided round-the-clock coverage and response, coalescing in what seemed to be anthropology’s first-ever rapid action team.

Meanwhile, the Occupy movement dramatically re-framed issues of plutocracy, wealth, and power, with anthropologist David Graeber playing a critical role. As a record number of attendees headed to the AAA annual meetings in Montreal, there were certainly reasons for optimism.

It is in this context that the December 2011 article “Anthropology as White Public Space?” was a particularly painful reminder of incongruities and what anthropology has been unable to accomplish. Anthropology as an academic discipline has generally been more willing to engage in autocritique and to take this further than other disciplines even begin to ponder. Anthropology also claims an anti-racist heritage and position. But though the authors found “some improvement” the overall tenor is that “many of the same exclusionary ideological and structural elements that the Committee on Minorities and Anthropology encountered [in 1973] are still prevalent in many anthropology departments” (2011:546).

This is a must-read article for anthropology. As the 2012 U.S. election season unfolds, vitriol and vicious denials of any kind of bias or structuring along lines of race, class, and gender will undoubtedly intensify. This is no time for anthropology to turn away from these issues.

Can a beleagured discipline simultaneously go through a transition to transnationalism and at the same time “take seriously the points of view of those who are internal others” (Brodkin et al. 2011:555)? I believe these issues can and must be linked and tackled together. But it requires awareness and political will.

Of most immediate relevance, and since I have the honor and privilege of blogging on the most distinguished of anthropology blogs, is how those of us who write and read anthropology blogs might contribute to this realignment. Anthropology blogs could potentially be a transnational hub and a place to embrace anthropologists of color, but I don’t think we are there yet.

Rex’s proposal to read and talk about HAU has real potential to address the kinds of “minimum consensus about transnational quality standards” Andre Gingrich discusses: “I would have great difficulties envisioning future postdocs in anthropology who have never done any fieldwork whatsoever, who speak no other language than their own, and who have never heard or read anything about Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, or Marcel Mauss” (2010:557). HAU precisely asks us to consider ethnographic insights, prominently includes translated works, and brings classic authors and basic texts to our attention.

At the same time, I want to highlight the insights from Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson:

The heart of our conclusion is embarrassingly obvious. It is this: the defamiliarizing insights and analyses generated from vantage points developed by anthropologists of color are better tools for diversifying departmental organization and culture (among other things) than hegemonic ones, and anthropology departments should embrace them instead of marginalizing them. Alternatively put, anthropology has made its mark on understanding cultures by taking seriously the points of view of those it studies. We suggest it needs to take seriously the points of view of those who are internal others to better understand and diversify itself as well as enhance its theoretical robustness. (2011:555)

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.

Carr starts off the post by expressing his concern that academia is using practices like peer review as a way to segregate itself from wider audiences.  He argues that peer review is, at heart, not a bad thing, since it provides a way of vetting ideas in an important way.  But, he writes:

the practice of peer review in contemporary academia has turned really problematic. Most respected journals are more expensive than ever, making access to them the near-sole province of academics with access to libraries willing to purchase such journals. The pressure to publish increases all the time, both in rising demands on individual researchers (my requirements for tenure were much tougher than most requirements from a generation before) and in terms of an ever-expanding academic community.

One of the deeper issues, Carr argues, is that peer review can be riddled with politics that end up “slowing the flow of innovative ideas into academia” because those ideas may “run contrary to previously-accepted ideas upon which many reviewers might have done their work.”  Ultimately, Carr writes, these issues with peer review certainly don’t do much to help with the public image of academia (although he is speaking more specifically to geographers here, this applies to academics in general).

Here’s Carr’s solution, or, at least, his ideas for a way to start digging out of this trench:

So, a modest proposal: senior colleagues of mine in Geography – yes, those of you who are full professors at the top of the profession, who have nothing to lose from a change in the status quo at this point – who will get together and identify a couple of open-access, very low-cost journals and more or less pronounce them valid (probably in part by blessing them with a few of your own papers to start). Don’t pick the ones that want to charge $1500 in publishing fees – those are absurd. But pick something different . . .

Again, although he is speaking directly to other geographers here, I think this proposal applies to and should resonate with the anthropological crowd as well.  For Carr, such a move would be a critical step for opening up academic publishing to wider possibilities, conversations, and collaborations.  I agree, and I think he is right that certain established faculty members are in an important position for inciting and promoting change.  It’s a matter of interest and desire.

At the same time, coming from the position of a graduate student, I can’t help but wonder how those of us on the, well, lower rungs of the academic ladder, can do to actively foster these kinds of changes.  Since we are all encouraged to publish publish publish, maybe it would be a good idea to start thinking more strategically about how and why we are publishing, and more importantly WHO we decide to publish with.  If every graduate student and new professor is constantly upholding the current regime by basically giving up the fruits of their labor (and effectively providing certain publishers with a never-ending stream of valuable products), why WOULD anything change?  So, in the end, I think that Carr is definitely right, but that many of these changes are going to have to start taking place on multiple fronts as well.

On that note, check this out.

They haven’t yet, but they are supporting SOPA, a bill that attempts to roll back Web 2.0 by making it easy to shut down entire sites like wikipedia and craigslist if they contain any user-submitted infringing material. (Here is a hypothetical airline-oriented version of SOPA, with only a little hyperbole about planes in the air.)

I think that appealing to Elsevier’s love of open scientific discourse is misguided. Individual employees there might be civic-minded, but ultimately they have $10 billion worth of reasons not to let the internet drive the costs of scientific publishing down to zero. Fortunately, their business model relies on the help of governments and academics. We can do our part to stop them by not publishing in, or refereeing for, their journals (the link describes other unethical Elsevier practices). Of course, this is easy to say in physics, harder in computer science, and a lot harder in fields like medicine.

That was via this post (thanks to Paul Manning on FB).  Michael E. Smith over at Publishing Archaeology is on it with news about related issues as well.  Now, some words from John Hawks about the NIH, public funded research, and open access:

Today’s NIH repository and the data access provisions of NSF grants were established by acts of Congress in the late 1990s. In my opinion, the agencies have in many areas gotten away with the bare minimum of compliance with these regulations. Worse, far from strengthening open access to publications and data, some in Congress want to reverse them. The current effort owes much to lobbying by academic publishers, and large campaign donations from officers and employees of those publishers to key Congressmen.

Read the rest of Hawks’ post here.  Just a few days ago, Rex wrote a post here on SM called “Why HR 3699 Sucks.”  Oh, and it does suck.  If you haven’t read it, then read it now.  He uses a nice analogy to explain what’s going on with academia and publishing, comparing the fruits of academic labor with public works like roads and highways.  Imagine if we all had to pay tolls to actually use highways and roads that are funded by public money.  Get it?  Ya, that’s what’s going on.  Here’s where Rex really lays down what’s what when it comes to the current state of open access affairs:

I can see why Big Content is afraid: we, the construction workers, engineers, and planners, are all willing to work for free to make roads for whoever wants to use them, and we have free software that basically will run all the back office stuff. Do you see the beauty of this situation? It’s the executives, not the workers, who are afraid of being laid off once people realize that 90% of the people actually building the roads can do it without the help of the guys in suits.

Now it might be true that the small amount of work that these back office types do is of a higher caliber than that done by our automated software. But it might not be — and they are working hard to make sure that we don’t find out which way the cookie crumbles.

In case you haven’t gotten the punchline yet: academic publishing is highway robbery, and academic publishers make Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist.

Now, go back and read the rest.  Be sure to read the other links too.  Then feel free to provide your own responses, thoughts, and links in the comments section here.  As John Hawks reminds us: “public comment on access to federally funded research ends this Thursday, January 12.”  From Michael E. Smith: “For more information about the bill and about WHAT U.S. CITIZENS CAN DO about this, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.”  Thoughts?

…a lot of time when tenure committees speak half-heartedly of ‘publishing in major journals’ or citation statistics what they really mean is that they want junior faculty’s names to appear on the things that they read — to see them (although probably not read them!) ‘around’ in ‘important places’.

John Hawks followed with a great one liner posted just below, indicating that Rex had indeed hit the mark.  He’s onto something.  It’s the part about appearing in “important places” that really got my attention.  If getting tenure is all about being in these important places, here’s my question: Who defines what is and what is not an important place?  And, if this is one of the primary functions of our current publishing (and tenure) model, what does this say about the current state of affairs?

Just a few questions for today.  What I appreciate about Rex is that his posts and comments always keep me thinking–and asking questions.  Maybe too many questions sometimes.  As a graduate student who is still somewhat on the outside of things looking in, however, these kinds of questions matter.

Also, what would be a good way of meeting this person without being all stalker-y?

Today’s adventure: headed to the Perry Library for a copy of William Rathje’s Rubish! and tracked the one copy down to a part of the building under renovation. The hallway was sealed off with heavy plastic sheeting and duct tape. It reminded me of the end of some X-files episode, you know, the one’s where Mulder and Scully wind up quarantined from an ancient virus? There’s literally like this slit floating there for the workers to enter in and out of. “Hello?” I called into to the work area, but everyone was on lunch. And I can see into the area with the books and they’re all on moveable stacks.

So I’m thinking I could just get my book and nobody would know the difference, but then I’d have to rearrange all the stacks to get it. I was checking out my surroundings to see if anyone was around me and nearby I found an office with people in it. Now with librarian in tow we headed into the work area and the guy is giving me a tour of the construction. Once we get to the stacks we can see that each individual moveable stack cart is wrapped in heavy sheeting.

So we’re pressing the plastic up against the stacks trying to find the TD973′s, move all the stacks wrapped in plastic, and then press the semi-transparent plastic up on the spines of the book. I tell him, “We’re going to need a pocket knife,” and he takes out his key chain and just gauges it open. “Aw its probably around here.” Reaches in there and pulls out my book.

I like librarians.

Seediq Bale is often described as a shi3shi1 史詩 – an “historical poem” – the typical Chinese translation of “epic.” The original epics were oral historical poetry, but orality and poetry are no longer essential features of epic. Maybe history isn’t essential either; epic is sometimes used with the simple meaning of “grand.” But I’ll be assuming a more complicated and interesting definition “a grand, repetitive mytho-historical narrative of conflict that begins in the middle (in medias res) captures the imagination of posterity because it bears on identity, both individual and collective.” It seems to me that Seediq Bale articulates an epic identity at odds with our modern notion of personal identity.

The most obvious meaning of epic is simply very long, and Seediq Bale is indeed very long. At four and a half hours, it is the longest Taiwan feature film by about half an hour. (Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer’s Day, to my knowledge the second longest, was a very different kind of film!). At a budget of 25 million USD it is the largest Taiwan production ever. The director Wei Te-sheng has plans for a three part epic treatment of Taiwan’s Dutch era (1624-1661), from Dutch, Chinese and Siraya plains aboriginal points of view. This would be another eight hours of epic filmmaking. After the theatres take their share of the gross, Seediq Bale is likely to remain in the red by a few million USD, so it’s not clear whether Wei Te-sheng will get the chance to make another epic film.

Seediq Bale also has many large battle scenes, involving large numbers of actors. The large battle scene is one of the defining features of the film epic. The way the battle scenes are filmed reflects an epic contrast of perspectives. Now we see the scene as a whole, from an objective perspective, now we switch to a close up in the heat of the action, from the perspectives of an individual hero.

Epics involve “epic machinery,” the world of gods above the world of men. In oral epic, the spirit world can be powerfully evoked, but film deals in images, and images of the numinous can be fantastical or just plain silly. It is usually better to suggest, not directly represent, the otherworld in a film. Seediq Bale tends to represent the spirits directly. Sometimes this works, as in the duet between Mona Rudao and the spirit of his father at the waterfall. Sometimes it does not work, as when the host of dead warriors appear walking on a rainbow cloud near the end of the film, first in profile, then head on. The CGI in the film, especially the animals, is generally pretty good, but the awfulness of the cloudborn warriors scene is universally acknowledged. The world of the gods in Seediq Bale is inhabited by the ancestors, which provides a justification for all seemingly objective shots, which is to say shots that do not represent the subjective POV of some character or other.

Like an oral epic, in which the same epithets are applied ad infinitum to fill out the metrical form, Seediq Bale is extremely repetitive. The violence of the film is repetitive, as in Homer’s Iliad. One could also complain about the repetitiveness of the (excellent) score and of the imagery. Mona Rudao’s CGI bird familiar appears half a dozen times, for instance. I don’t know how many times Mona Rudao mentions the rainbow bridge across which true men, men who have headhunted, can cross to reach the rich hunting ground of the afterlife – a dozen times at least. Repetitiveness is not necessarily a flaw in a work of art; it is arguably a feature of the epic form, especially since epic tends to be oral. Films are more oral than novels, and we tend to tolerate oral repetition more than we do in writing.

Starting in medias res is one of the defining features of the narrative structure of an epic. The Iliad starts not with the beginning of the war or the causes of the war but with the theme of Achilles’s wrath in the final year of the story. Seediq Bale starts in medias res with a scene in which Mona Rudao hunts a wild boar. But this scene is near the beginning; the only flashback is when Mona Rudao remembers his father teaching him about the traditional beliefs. Otherwise, the narrative structure of Seediq Bale is temporally straightforward. The action sometimes divides into several strands, but these strands proceed together in time and are linked by crosscutting.

Epics are stories of conflict that seem significant to posterity because of the role they play in identity construction. Conflict is after all a wonderful catalyst for identity, because it forces one to take sides. Some war stories are no longer significant for identity construction, because they seem somehow too far away, yet they still capture the imagination. The Spartan resistance to the Persian advance at Thermopylae, the story of 300 defending a pass against an army of thousands, is a good example. The most recent retelling of this story is the film 300. This film seems to have a lot in common with Seediq Bale. Like 300, Seediq Bale is a film that aestheticizes violence (by juxtaposing the breathtakingly beautiful sakura bloom with images of gore, for instance) and which was adapted from a comic book (see the cover of the comic book which inspired Seediq Bale below). I think Seediq Bale even alludes to the Spartan resistance. The Japanese general who leads the reprisal is stunned that three hundred indigenous warriors could resist thousands of highly trained troops of a modern army with planes, Howitzers, and poison gas.

But like an oral epic, and unlike a purely commercial film like 300, Seediq Bale seems to have a contemporary meaning. That contemporary meaning has to do with identity construction, both individual and collective.

First, what does the film say about individual identity? Mona Rudao’s concept of identity has a wonderful simplicity: he has an unambiguous external marker of his individuality. Like Odysseus, Mona Rudao bears a scar, a scar on his cheek as a result of a hunting accident. This serves as visual proof of his identity for everyone he meets. It allows the audience to identify Mona Rudao as a young man and a middle aged man – he’s played by two actors. His scar reminds me of Erich Auerbach’s great essay “Odysseus’s Scar.” Auerbach argued that identity in Homeric epic is externalized, in contrast to the internalized identity of Biblical narrative. Odysseus returned home after years of wandering and was recognized by his wet nurse because of the unambiguous mark on his thigh. Classicists and biblical scholars debate Auerbach’s interpretation; but it seems to me that “an unambiguous externalized identity” applies to Mona Rudao.

For Mona Rudao does not just have a single scar. He also has the scars of the tattoos on his chin and forehead. These scars attest to his status as a “real man,” a seediq bale, a person qualified to cross the rainbow bridge into the happy hunting grounds of the afterlife. These scars mark his status as an adult male, a warrior. How easy it is to tell a real man from a child, in Mona Rudao’s world!

In this respect Mona Rudao is an impressive but ultimately rather uninteresting character. His concept of identity is more status than identity. It’s either/or, and it’s externally marked. In Seediq Bale Mona Rudao relates to the child warrior Bawan Nawi that he visited Japan in the 1900s. He seems to have returned to Taiwan with only a technological concept of modernity. He knew the Japanese had powerful weapons, but didn’t get any idea of psychological modernity. His sense of himself remained ancient. According to Wei Te-sheng, he lauched the attack on Wushe as a headhunting ritual for a generation of young Seediq men who had not had the chance to become bale.

Mona Rudao’s concept of identity as externalized status is juxtaposed in the film with a more modern concept of personal identity. The most interesting example of a modern identity in the film is the Dakis/Hanaoka brothers, especially the elder brother Dakis Nobin or Hanaoka Ichiro. The brothers suffer from a more modern complicated idea of self. Born Seediq, they were educated to be Japanese. They were caught between Japanese modernity and Seediq tradition. In the film they are bullied by their Japanese colleagues and rejected by their own people. In this scene at the waterfall, Mona Rudao asks the elder brother to choose: are you going to the Shinto shrine when you die, or will you walk across the rainbow bridge?

Conflict catalyzes identity because it forces a person to choose, as if who you are is which side you’re on. The brothers want to claim both Seediq and Japanese identities. Nobody lets them. For them, the conflict becomes psychological, internal. In the end brothers can’t choose which side they are on. The brothers let Mona Rudao launch the attack against the Japanese at Wushe but don’t participate in it. They commit suicide together, one by seppuku, the other by hanging, the one according to Japanese, the other according to Seediq tradition.

Together they embody a modern psychological conflict. Alongside Mona Rudao’s unambiguous, lofty, epic concept of identity is a more confused, conflicted, contextualized idea of identity. The psychological conflicts of the brothers, which are conflicts of identity, enrich Seediq Bale. Yet they are not typical of epic. Epic conflicts are between sides or within a side, not within the individual. In the Iliad the Greek side spends most of the time fighting amongst themselves before they finally get their act together and defeat the Trojans by stealth. This might be called epic identity construction.

The notion of epic identity construction brings me back to the issue of Taiwan identity. The reader will recall that The Economist linked the film to Taiwan identity. It’s indisputable that the film is about identity. It even advertises itself as a comment on identity. The preview released at the end of August tells us right off the bat that we’ll be transported back to “an era of confused identities” (認同混淆的年代). People who know the story will think of the Dakis/Hanaoka brothers. They each had a confused identity. It’s clear that the film is commenting on individual identity. Is it also commenting on group identity, in particular Taiwan identity?

I think so, but in this respect Wei Te-sheng deserves credit for some degree of subtlety. Previous filmic or fictional treatments of Wushe have often overtly linked Wushe to Chinese and Taiwanese national identity. In his A History of Pain, the scholar Michael Berry has shown how Chinese nationalists saw Mona Rudao as participating in the national Chinese resistance against Japan (抗日), while Taiwanese nationalists viewed Mona Rudao as symbolically willing to defend Taiwan’s territory at the cost of his own life. Both kinds of nationalists identified with Mona Rudao and often inserted a Chinese or Taiwanese character who serves as Mona Rudao’s big brother or trusted adviser. In other words, in these works, there is Chinese or Taiwanese identification or close association with Mona Rudao and the Seediq rebels. This may remind students of American popular culture of the Mohawks at the Boston Tea Party and of James Fenimore Cooper’s oft-retold tale Last of the Mohicans. Americans also identified or closely associated with indigenous peoples, at an early stage of settler nation building.

There were Americans pretending to be ungovernable “revolting” Mohican Indians at the Boston Tea Party, and Leatherstocking, the main character in the works of Fenimore Cooper, America’s first national novelist, is bosom buddies with Chinggachgook. As the last of the Mohicans, Chinggachgook rather conveniently leaves the country to Leatherstocking’s people, the “Americans.” Seediq Bale, by contrast, is less overtly nationalistic. There are no Chinese or Taiwanese characters in Seediq Bale pretending to be Seediq or associating with the Seediq. In fact, there aren’t any significant Chinese or Taiwanese characters in the film at all.

That doesn’t mean that Seediq Bale doesn’t have anything to do with Taiwan identity. In the past two decades there has been an Wushe comic book and, inevitably, an album by the black metal band CthtoniC that went on to tour the States with Ozzy Ozborne. Both works come out of Taiwan nationalism, but in neither case is the link between Wushe and Taiwan identity made overtly within the work.

So what would a Taiwanese nationalist interpretation of Seediq Bale be like? The simplest nationalist interpretation of the film would be to identify Mona Rudao with a future Taiwanese leader and the Seediq rebels with this leader’s supporters. The Japanese would represent a potential invader. Let’s assume this invader is the PRC. To put it crudely or bluntly (and this is a crude and blunt interpretation) from a Taiwanese perspective, the film is, on this interpretation, saying that the Taiwanese people will defend their territory. They’d rather die than submit.

There are some problems with this interpretation. To begin with, if the Seediq in Seediq Bale represent the Taiwanese people, then the film seems to be saying that the Taiwanese public is hopelessly fragmented, because the Seediq in the film are hopelessly fragmented. Not everyone would rather die than submit. Mona Rudao was Seediq, but he didn’t lead a united Seediq resistance against the Japanese. Rather, he arranged a coalition of six Tkdaya Seediq tribal villages. Tkdaya is the name of a subgroup of the Seediq linguistic or cultural group. Mona Rudao was a leader of a Tkdaya village called Mahebo in alliance with other Tkdaya villages. Not all the Tkdaya villages participated in the Wushe Incident, only six of twelve. Other Seediq groups were antagonistic to the Tkdaya. The Toda Seediq, for instance, led in the film by Temu Walis, cooperated with the Japanese during the reprisal that followed the Wushe Incident. Not all of the Toda villages participated. The Japanese promised the participating Toda warriors so much money per Tkdaya Seediq head, and so the Toda went after the Tkdaya. In other words, Seediq Bale is a story about internal divisions more than an epic tale of anticolonial resistance.

Maybe the fragmentation in the Seediq body politic is not really an interpretive problem, because Taiwan’s body politic is hopelessly fragmented (which country’s isn’t?). At this point in the argument, some knowledge of Taiwan’s political scene is necessary. Identity, as opposed to social justice or the environment, has been the main political issue in Taiwan for decades, arguably since the Japanese period. After 1937 the Japanese implemented a policy of imperialization: everyone was taught to be an imperial subject. The KMT Chinese nationalist policy was similar: everyone in Taiwan was taught he or she was Chinese; the national myth was the reconquest of mainland China. Since the rise of a vocal Taiwan nationalism in the 1980s, identity confusion has become overt. There are some who feel they are Taiwanese and Chinese, some insist they are Taiwanese not Chinese. And with the missiles pointed at Taiwan, militant mainland Chinese rhetoric, and American vacillation, it’s not hard to see why identity is the main issue in local politics. If cross-Strait relations heated up, there would be a corresponding political polarization. At that time, through a process of “epic identity construction,” Mona Rudao’s either/or statement of status (“I am Seediq!) would come to seem even more compelling, and the Dakis/Hanaoka both/and idea of identity (“We’re both Seediq and Japanese…”) even more wishy washy.

Unfortunately, the ending of Seediq Bale does not give Taiwan nationalists cause for comfort. That’s the problem with choosing this particular historical incident as a nationalist myth, because the ending is predetermined by the history of Wushe: the Seediq lose. If we’re applying a Taiwanese nationalist interpretation to the film, whatever would this ending mean? In the film the warriors of the rainbow reunite in the afterlife; we see them striding on the clouds. This is hardly going to satisfy people for whom Seediq traditional belief is not a living religion. The fact is that almost everyone dies. Maybe like Achilles they die gloriously, but maybe it would be better not to die. Unlike Homer’s Iliad, Seediq Bale does not have a happy ending from the protagonist’s persective. And we can’t argue that Wei Te-sheng is telling the Taiwan people: this is what will happen to you if you don’t unite. If the Seediq in the film – all 12 Tkdaya tribes plus the Toda tribal villages - had united against the Japanese, the result would have ultimately been the same.

At the end of the film, four hours and twenty minutes in, we are reassured that the Seediq people have not been wiped out; they will recover. They will have Seediq children and those children will have children. But when you think about this, it’s not all that comforting. Those children would grow up under the Japanese and those grandchildren would grow up under the Chinese. Last time I checked Taiwan was not postcolonial from a Seediq perspective, because the Taiwanese people who like to identify with the Seediq – like the Americans who identified with the revolting Mohawks in 1775 – are running the island. So ultimately I still resist a Taiwan nationalist interpretation of the film. The Wushe Incident has to be understood in terms of 1930. I don’t think it has much to teach us about Taiwan identity today. The collective identity the film seems to express does not seem, as The Economist puts, empowering, certainly not in a contemporary context. There is a collective action in the film, but the action is doomed to failure and only half of the collective participates in it. Epic identity is impressive, but the modern, wishy-washy identity also has its place. Epic requires conflict; I pray for peace.

Maybe Wei Te-sheng does too. On a talk show Wei Te-sheng said he realized the film was about a conflict of belief, the people who believe in the rising sun and the people who believe in the rainbow bridge. What if the Japanese and Seediq, Wei naively wonders, had realized that the sun and the rainbow hang in the same sky, in the same heaven? Maybe it took the Wushe Incident for them to realize it. I hope it doesn’t take another incident for us to realize the same thing today.

The story concerns King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and its extraordinary efforts to recruit top scientists to its faculty. Tellingly one such faculty recruit thought the offer was a email scam or joke: an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year with only a two weeks spent on campus but which would require one to add KAU as an affiliation on the Institute for Scientific Information’s list of highly cited researchers.

Here’s the deal: everyone thinks you’re awesome so I’ll pay you $6000 a month to basically not do anything, but you have to tell everyone that you work for me.

Science has learned of more than 60 top-ranked researchers from different scientific disciplines – all on ISI’s highly cited list – who have recently signed a part-time employment arrangement with the university that is structured along [these lines]. Meanwhile, a bigger, more prominent Saudi institution – King Saud University in Riyadh – has climbed several hundred places in international rankings in the past 4 years largely through initiatives specifically targeted toward attaching KSU’s name to research publications, regardless of whether the work invovled any meaningful collaboration with KSU researchers.
…
Academics who have accepted KAU’s offer represent a wide variety of faculty from elite institutions in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. All are men. Some are emeritus professors who have recently retired from their home institutions. All have changed their affiliations on ISI’s highly cited list – as required by KAU’s contract – and some have added KAU as an affiliation on research papers.

I can hear my students talking back to me now. “Dr. Thompson, you’re just playa hatin’” True, for that kind of money I’d do much less dignified things than this! But I’m guessing an R1 emeritus isn’t exactly hurting either. Granted the individuals who get this incredible offer are leaders in their field, a status they have earned through years of hard work. I’m just incredulous that they’d be willing to traffic on that prestige for a quick buck.

Neil Robertson, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Ohio State University in Columbus who has signed on, says he has no concerns about the offer. “It’s just capitalism,” he says. “They have the capital and they want to build something out of it.”

Capitalism is now ethically neutral, apparently.

Another KAU affiliate, astronomer Gerry Gilmore of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, notes that “universities buy people’s reputations all the time. In principle, this is no different from Harvard hiring a prominent researcher.”

Except if you got a job at Harvard you would be contributing to the scholarly community at Harvard by teaching classes and interacting with your peers (at least more than two weeks out of the year).

A number of American universities have opened branch offices in oil rich nations in the Middle East. I remember in grad school Qatar waved a wad of cash at the University of North Carolina in hopes that it would set up an overseas franchise (this was ’01-’02). We debated the merits of the proposal in seminar with Judy Farquar. Maybe junior faculty would be willing to live abroad for two years and earn double the pay without having to pay rent? That would take care of those student loans real quick.

The UNC-Qatar marriage was over before it began. Too many found it objectionable to sell the school’s name to Qatar even if UNC faculty would be teaching the courses. Qatar can afford to buy its own school and hire its own faculty, but the cultural capital conveyed by a degree from the U of Q (QU?) is going to be less than a brand name American school – the very situation KAU is trying to remedy. Instead of buying an entire school as Qatar attempted to, they can cherry pick individual faculty for much less. It’s like Frazer’s Law of Contagion, the professor’s name touches the school and POOF! it’s prestigious. Action at a distance!

The $72,000 a year adjunct professorship: nice work if you can get it.

Make sure they will say yes: Ask your advisor if they think the prof would be a good fit on your committee. A lot of the time professors will talk to each other first before you meet, so the new addition to your committee may already know you are coming and has already basically agreed to serve. A lot happens behind the scenes in academe, so even though it is ‘your’ committee, its very important to work with your advisor so that they can shepherd the whole thing along.

Pop the question early: There’s nothing weirder than having a graduate student come to your office and spend five minutes explaining why they have the same intellectual interests as you, seemingly for no reason. Perhaps they are planning to do this for your entire office hour…? It’s far better to just sit down, be business like, and say “the reason that I’m here to see you today is to ask you to serve on my dissertation committee. Uh… will you?” Remember: the goal is to have this already taken care of ahead of time, which means your probably next step will be to:

Accept acceptance gracefully: If someone agrees to be on your committee then… say thank you! They may want to talk more (for which, see below) but they may also be very busy and consider this whole embarrassing ritual a waste of time. Take your cue from the prof — this meeting could be really short.

Accept rejection gracefully: If someone says no, don’t ‘personalize’ — people decide not to serve on committees for all sorts of reasons, not because you are a total fraud who doesn’t really belong in graduate school. Sometimes people are just too busy, sometimes they have personal issues with other committee members, etc. etc. There are lots of reasons people say no. Its ok to push people a little bit: are you sure? Do you mind if I ask why? But don’t push too hard. Those who say no will still end up evaluating your work in the future. There’s no point upsetting someone when you could have a perfectly collegial relationship.

Prepare for ‘the Probe’: The problem is a long, metal instrument professors keep in their office to… no just kidding. Often before deciding to be on your committee professors will ask a couple of probing questions to see who you are and what you are doing. Much of the time they know they are going to say yes, but they still want a sense of who you are and what they are getting into. This kind of thing may also happen immediately after they agree to serve if they want to move on to the nuts and bolts of the advising relationship.

Basically, you should be able to say why you want to work with someone — how their interests overlap with yours, what you might read together in the future and so forth. I’d advise reading the acknowledgements and introduction to their dissertation to get a sense of their genealogy, as well as their latest article or two so you can understand what they’ve been working on lately.

You don’t have to knock the ball out of the park on this one — I think a lot of professors just want some very basic sense that you know what you are doing, and where they will fit into it.

Discuss expectations: No one registers for their wedding after the first date, but it does help in this initial meeting to give your committee member some sense of how much of their attention you’ll be needing. Some people want assurances that you are not going to show up on their doorstep too often, while others are not going to take you on unless they know you are ready to put in some serious time with them. Giving a committee member a sense of what you want from them is helpful, as if making sure you learn what they are willing to contribute to your committee.

But above all, professors are crazy people and office hours are an extremely strange institution. You have to learn to roll with the punches. If someone wants to talk about baseball for five minutes before you get started, let them. If they are super busy and want to shoo you out of the office after they “yes yes, I’ve talked to professor Jones about this, I’ll be on your committee” then get out from underfoot. And above all, if the vibe seems seriously off, don’t ask someone to be on your committee who you don’t think should be there.

This is such a small thing, but like a lot of things in academia someone its something that we never really talk about. So maybe this will help provide some transparency on this small academic ritual.

Before you do anything else, you should answer the following question: why are you are going to graduate school in anthropology?

If the answer is that you want an academic career in anthropology, you might think twice about graduate school. I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but I think the percentage of current anthropology Ph.D.s who are likely to find tenure track jobs in an anthropology department isn’t much better than the percentage of people in college rock bands who go on to sign deals with major record labels. If rock ‘n roll is in your veins, nobody is going to dissuade you from trying to make a career of it, and if you feel the same way about anthropology I say “Go for it!” Otherwise, I’d suggest something else.

Of course, even within academia there are a range of choices. If signing a tenure track contract at Chicago is the pinnacle of the academic job market there are lots of decent options further down the slope: including teaching in another field or an interdisciplinary department (I’m in a program on “ethnic relations and culture”), teaching at a community college, or teaching outside of the U.S., etc. But even if you do get a job, know that academia almost everywhere is under attack from a range of neoliberal policies and budgetary cutbacks, so be ready for a rough ride.

Some of you might be interested in applied careers. Here I think there are a lot more options and I would be much more encouraging. There is a real demand for people with anthropology degrees in a variety of careers. The AAA has a page listing some of them, and I like this list from the counseling centre at the University of Manitoba, but I think the real list is nearly infinite. Basically anything you can do without an anthropology degree can be done better with an anthropology degree. Or at least I think so, and so (it seems) do many employers.

Knowing the answer to the first question will affect what you do next. I won’t spell out all the possible permutations, but suffice to say that if you want a job at one of the top anthropology programs in the US, you would be best off attending such a program. Sure, someone from a third tier university still has a shot at getting a job a the top programs, but know that the odds are stacked against you. Partially because the top universities are more likely to give you the funding, support, and training necessary to do top-quality work and partially because of the sometimes incestuous nature of the discipline. Still, there are many good reasons you might not simply choose a university based on its ranking. For instance, there might be supporting programs which you might wish to make use of at another university, such as a good film school, or medical school, or linguistics program, etc. This could be especially useful for those going into more applied programs.

One thing I tell international students looking to go to the US is that they are best off applying for a Ph.D. program. Many countries more clearly demarcate the M.A. and Ph.D. and so it is good to know that these programs are likely to be combined in the U.S. Rather than writing an M.A. thesis, you will be required to take the same courses as M.A. students and will receive your M.A. upon completion of your qualifying examinations (and/or submission of your dissertation research proposal). As such, it doesn’t really make sense to apply for an M.A. and doing so will often disqualify you from funding opportunities.

Now we get to the hard part. How to pick the program which is right for you? My response to this question is that if you don’t already know the answer you should give yourself six months to a year to do research on graduate programs. I know it sounds like a long time, but the truth is that it is a very difficult question and researching the answer requires doing a lot of reading. That’s because I think you are best off researching professors, not programs [but see note #1 below]. You need to find people who are doing work that you like, that excites you, that makes you want to give up seven to nine years of your life doing something similar. And the time will be well spent because knowing the answer to this question will not only help you pick good a graduate school, it will also help you prepare your application, making it more likely that you will be accepted to the program of your choice.

Of course, knowing you like the work of a particular professor doesn’t necessarily answer the question of which graduate program you should attend. Because the current job market is such a mess someone who does great work might be unemployed or might be teaching somewhere other than in a graduate program in anthropology. But you can write to that person and ask for advice. Perhaps you could study with their teacher, or one of their classmates, who are at a university better suited to your needs. It also sometimes happens that great programs get split up and the professors scatter to a number of other universities. To sort all this out you need to become a scholar of the recent history of academic anthropology. You should also attend AAA meetings and try to talk your way into some of the various parties being held by the graduate programs you are interested in (often in their hotel rooms after the meetings are over), or perhaps just visit the school and try to talk with some of the graduate students. The point is that if you aren’t simply choosing programs based on the name of the university, it is a difficult choice and requires some careful research. Take the time and do it right.

Finally, everyone should have a “Plan B” (and even “C”). It is sometimes possible to transfer to your first choice program after spending a year or two somewhere else. It is also possible that your second choice turns out to be better than you thought. But also be ready to do something else if a career in anthropology doesn’t turn out the way you wanted. A number of my friends dropped out of academia and while fellow academics treated this as a kind of death, they themselves seem much happier as a result. Sure, they miss it sometimes, but then they come to their senses.

NOTES:

1. Since I recommended choosing a gradate program based on how much you like the work being done by individual professors, I should add a word of warning: professors can get sick, they can loose their jobs, and they can move to other universities. While finding an individual professor is a good way to start the job hunt, be wary of picking a program because of just one faculty member. Best if there are a couple of professors you would be willing to work with at the same university. You are going to have to take courses with the rest of the faculty anyway, so you’d better like them.

Within a few weeks #occupyharvard and #occupyberkeley made the news. Especially notable was the use of violence against peaceful protesters at Berkeley. Among them was former poet laureate of the United States, Robert Hass, who wrote:

“Whose university?” the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs, and it ought to be everyone else’s in California. It also belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest systems of public education in the world.

That question, “Whose university?” came to the fore again at #Occupy UC Davis, where,

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

That’s from this courageous open letter from an untenured assistant English professor to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. Nathan Brown’s letter is worth reading in full, so I won’t excerpt it here. Also worth watching in full, is the video of the students getting pepper sprayed and then chasing the police off campus, as well as a silent protest the following night.

There was even solidarity for the #occupy movement at the AAA, where there was an”Occupy AAA General Assembly” as well as an “Accessible Anthropological Assembly”. Not having been there, I look forward to full reports from those who were.

I imagine that the #occupy movement will grow even larger in response to the brutal attempts to suppress it. Feel free to treat the comments here as a second open thread on the occupy movement in academia. I’d be particularly interested in hearing from campuses which haven’t gotten as much news, and from anthropology students who have been involved with these movements.

Ryan Anderson: I think this last point you make about the direct role that faculty and graduate students play in all this is really important. We all have choices, and ultimately the publishing and communication system is what we make of it. So, as a last question for you, what advice do you have for people who are interested in these issues but unsure where to start looking for others who share similar concerns, values, and commitments?

Jason Baird Jackson: The open access community is by its very nature, open. In North American and European contexts, finding folks eager to help students and established scholars negotiate these questions is pretty easy. If one is at a university with a research- oriented library, there will be one or more librarians specializing in these issues. Such librarians often lead workshops on such topics as “author’s rights,” “copyright issues for scholars,” and “open access.” Librarians have a strong service ethic and are usually very eager to help scholars get their bearings on these topics. They are SO eager to find faculty allies on these questions. If you give them a moment, they will also passionately explain why OA matters so much to the future of the library and its public service mission.

While research libraries at larger universities are often a center of gravity for information and resources on these topics, librarians at teaching colleges are often just as energized and knowledgeable about these matters because, given their scale and budgets, open access is even more important to them as they seek to serve their campuses. Librarian Barbara Fister at Gustavus Adolphus College is a great example. She writes wonderful columns on these topics for Inside Higher Education and Library Journal. She’s the kind of thinker, activist, and explainer who is very accessible online. I have already mentioned Peter Suber and the explanatory resources that he has assembled with the help of the larger community.

There are organizations working on the creation of educational resources and tools that scholars should know about. In addition to organizations and databases that I have already mentioned, I would want colleagues to know about the Creative Commons and its work in this area. The Creative Commons website is a place to begin. There one can find great explanatory videos and other resources. Of special relevance within The Creative Commons organization are its science efforts, including the Science Commons project and the Scholar’s Copyright Project.

Also relating specifically to OA, SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is a great organization with great resources.

Open Access Week, held each fall, is a major opportunity for educational projects and efforts worldwide.

The work of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University is also vital to the development of this sector. CHNM works at the point where scholarly communications issues meet the digital humanities and open source software development. They make invaluable software tools like Zotero, and Omeka and have organized innovative projects such as the OA book Hacking the Academy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), to which I contributed a small essay on scholarly communications.

Its good for scholars to better understand the actual links connecting open access scholarship and open source software. Available itself in an OA edition, Chris Kelty’s book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) addresses this link. Key to much work in open access are open source software platforms such as Open Journal Systems and DSpace. In some ways technical protocols that allow open access projects to talk with one another and share information are even more important. The most crucial of these is the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Just as I wish more of us were working to understand who pays the bills for the current scholarly communications system, I also wish more of us appreciated the ways that technical systems and choices were alternatively closing down or opening up opportunities for the circulation and preservation of our scholarship.

Just as open access has ties to alternative intellectual property systems such as the Creative Commons and to free software/open source software projects, it is also connected to efforts at creating and sharing freely available educational resources with students and lifelong learners. This domain is called Open Educational Resources (OER). Scholars can investigate OER efforts such as Connexions, OER Commons, and MIT OpenCourseWare.

Talking about software development and metadata protocols is a terribly boring way to end our conversation. If our colleagues would like to be introduced to this world in a more fun way, there are many very accessible videos that have been produced to address the issues we have been discussing. Among my favorites are a great series of five one minute videos produced in German and English by OA advocates in Germany and a really hilarious critique of commercial scholarly publishing by Alex O. Holcombe called “Scientist Meets Publisher.” Its not funny like the Holcombe piece, but a very helpful introduction to “Author’s Rights” for scholarly authors is a video by SPARC on Blip.tv.

In our corner of scholarship, there is a vibrant community of anthropologists and folklorists working towards the goals of OA. There are new journals and projects coming online all the time. The circle of scholars joining the conversation is expanding and thus we have more and more colleagues to turn to for help and more opportunities to contribute meaningfully to the effort as individuals. Given the relationship between much of our scholarship and the (often disadvantaged) communities within which we work, our fields have an extra-ordinarily good set of reasons for making OA work. If the physicists can find a way to do it, certainly we can as well.

RA: That’s a great point to end with.  And I agree with you that we have plenty of reasons to work toward OA.  Thanks for taking the time to do this interview, Jason.  I hope we can keep these conversations going, here and elsewhere.

JBJ: Thank you very much Ryan for this opportunity and for all of the ways that you are working towards OA goals.

Ryan Anderson: So what are the major stumbling blocks holding up a transition to Open Access in your view? What’s keeping most people from making this jump? Lastly, what do you think about the system employed by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) where authors can post working papers? Can a system like that be a stepping stone to OA?

Jason Baird Jackson: At the author level, one stumbling block is a pervasive lack of basic knowledge about these issues among scholars and policy makers within our field (and in most fields). I am sympathetic to everyone’s plight. It is all very complicated and uncertain therefore doing what we have always done has proven the easiest path. Most of us do not understand copyright or the Creative Commons system. Most of us do not understand journal business models or how it is that librarians have made so much (expensive) information so easily available to those of us with the luxury of university affiliations. In the face of much confusion and anxiety, just sending our manuscripts to the editors and journals that we know in the way that we have always done has seemed sensible and prudent.

Related is the situation in which we perceive that we understand the changing landscape better than we do. A clear instance is when we post the final published versions of our writings online because we wrongly believe ourselves to have the right to do so. The increasing prevalence of such accidental piracy fosters the misunderstanding that such practices are the right way to do open access. Such piracy is counter-productive on many levels and is unnecessary given that there are legal and technically better ways to pursue OA.

Such author-centered issues are the major stumbling block for green OA. The fact that many scholars do not have direct access to a home institutional repository is another factor. I tried to suggest that there are usually workarounds for this in my earlier comments. Your mentioning of the Social Science Research Network represents another possible solution that anthropologists should investigate more actively [see Adam Leeds' comment about SSRN here on Savage Minds a while back]. I have not yet given it the attention that it deserves as a possible option for anthropologists.

The biggest factor driving green OA are funder and especially institutional OA mandates (touched upon above). Those who are most eager to promote OA in anthropology can work locally to establish mandates in their home institutions. When a university such as Kansas or California or a college such as Oberlin, or when (hypothetically) a research institute, applied anthropology agency or museum, establish a green OA mandate, this has the almost immediate effect of educating the entire research community at such an institution about the issues that we have been talking about, above and beyond the obvious direct benefit of bringing a large portion of that institution’s research output into the OA domain. Such mandates can be established at the school or department level in instances where an institution-wide mandate cannot yet be achieved. The most prominent and persistent advocate for green OA and for green OA mandates is cognitive scientist Steven Harnad, who makes the case consistently and forcefully, on the basis of much evidence, at his website Open Access Archivangelism.

On the gold OA front, the problems center on the business model question. Publishing costs money. In a reoriented scholarly publishing system emphasizing open access, where will that money come from? Alongside some misleading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) campaigning on the part of commercial publishers and their allies, there is a lot of hard work going into finding ways to address the business model issues. The money issues are real and I do not know of any serious advocate for change in scholarly publishing who does not acknowledge the need to address them. There is much work to do in many domains but no scholarly field needs to reinvent the wheel alone. There are many allies to be found and many solutions are already well underway. We now have actual gold journals—some quite prominent—about which we can questions like: How are you making this work? Who is paying your bills? What are your submission and acceptance rates? How much labor or money goes into formatting your articles? What is your preservation plan? Your succession plan? Your intellectual property strategy? Etc.

As Chris Kelty has stressed most prominently, the changing publishing system is forcing (or will eventually force) scholarly societies to reconsider their roles in intellectual and public life, as well as the ways in which they support themselves financially—above and beyond their work as publishers or co-publishers. Scholarly society leaders really have no other choice but to do the hard work of thinking about the future in a world in which much is going to be different. This is not solely about publishing, but because so much of the life of scholarly societies has been wrapped up in publishing–as an activity of substantive importance and as a source, for some societies, of basic operating revenue—the future of scholarly publishing is deeply entwined with the future of scholarly societies. This relates to OA but is not limited to OA. For instance, separate from OA considerations, the AAA sections are seeing shifts in membership that are surely due in part to the restructuring of AAA’s publishing program in the digital era. What benefits, above and beyond access to a journal, will a scholarly society provide? Are these rich enough to motivate individuals to join and remain members? These are the leading edge questions for scholarly societies now, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. I teach at a major research university and effectively no longer have any access to funding to support professional travel. Fewer and fewer have access to resources with which to attend professional meetings. How much longer can physical meetings and print journals be the center of gravity for any scholarly society? I do not want to suggest that society leaders are unaware of these dynamics. As a board member of the American Folklore Society and as a person who follows the AAA and several other societies closely, I know that they are. I am just echoing Chris in observing that it is not possible for society publishers or co-publishers to tackle publishing in isolation from other dramatic transformations of the present moment.

Partnerships with for-profit publishers as well as with not-for-profit organizations like JSTOR and ProjectMuse have made journals an important revenue stream for those who publish or co-publish them. This is the sticky wicket. While I think that I know how a group of dedicated individuals working with the backing of a publishing society or organization could (along with library partners) sustainably move a major legacy journal out of the toll access column and into the gold open access one, my present efforts and advocacy have mainly focused first on the easier to solve problems and on experiments designed to as proof-of-concept efforts. For instance, at nearly no cost, the Open Folklore project has made the section journals published by the American Folklore Society (along with other journals in the field) openly available through a number of means, including through the HathiTrust Digital Library. Those journals had not yet been turned into revenue generating machines, thus it was much easier to make them more open without any financial consequences. Other societies have similar scholarly content that could be made open without organizational consequences. The state-level anthropology society journals are finding their way into open access collections in this way. An example is the rich and important journal Florida Anthropologist published by the Florida Anthropological Society and now made available via the University of Florida Libraries.

In the proof-of-concept space, Museum Anthropology Review is very much a thriving experiment designed to learn how gold open access journals in anthropology and neighboring fields can work. I have learned a lot from MAR and am trying to use that experience to help other journals that are trying to make gold OA work in a sustainable and responsible way. Such project-by-project work can bring together pragmatists and ideologues of various stripes in the common work of increasing the amount of the scholarly literature that is openly accessible. We do not need to solve the most difficult problems first.

Let me return quickly to your special interest in the prospects for using the Social Science Research Network. As I say, I do not know enough yet about it to be an advocate (or critic), but I do know a little. Anthropologists are already making use of it. Legal anthropologists such as Annelise Riles (because SSRN is big with the law school community) are already there, making available their work in post-print form. Thus SSRN is not a potential stepping-stone to OA, it is one extant, working means of doing OA now. I am uneasy with the SSRN business model and technical infrastructure, but it is the main way that green OA is getting done in some institutions and disciplines. It is prominent part of the green OA ecology that we talked about earlier.

RA: Can we return now to the second part of my earlier question about the difference between the “just another business model” view on the one hand (i.e. the way that some publishers are looking at this) and the position of OA advocates in anthropology who are rethinking what you call “scholarly research outputs”? Are these positions fundamentally at odds with one another?

JBJ: Many commercial publishers are now engaged in what is called hybrid open access projects. These are based on providing authors with the option of purchasing full gold-like open access to their articles on behalf of their readers. There are also numerous journals in other fields that are fully gold open access journals that are built around the collection of author’s fees. Some of these author fee-based journals are non-commercial journals that use fee revenue just to cover expenses while others are for-profit publishers. In the latter case, author fee revenue contributes, above and beyond expenses, to the overall profitability of the firm. In both the hybrid and commercial gold OA cases, authors are paying additional sums (separate from the older practices of paying page charges that began in the pre-digital era) for the purpose of making their work openly available in final form while also publishing in the particular journals in question.

This is all rather foreign to most anthropologists. Pages charges were (and remain) rare in anthropology [Economic Botany is the only journal for which I was ever assessed page charges] and the costs associated with hybrid and author-pays gold open access publishing are beyond the ability of almost all anthropologists to pay. This system is predicated on a large grant, big lab system of scientific production that is rare in anthropology and impossible in the humanities. Recognizing this, some major universities have developed funds to subsidize such costs but this is also not at all a complete solution for anthropology. Anthropology, and folklore studies even more, are fields to which many different people working in many different settings can and do contribute regardless of ability to pay.

So for commercial publishers, author-pays forms of OA are increasingly seen as another viable/profitable business model, but for most anthropologists and folklorists, it is a business model that does not seem to make sense for their fields, even if in other fields it has produced remarkable and largely positive effects.

Not all OA advocates in anthropology think alike about inevitable and/or desired changes in scholarly communication. They possess a diversity of motivations and experiences and they sometimes advocate different goals. Some are more reform minded and some are more revolutionary. Some are animated by technical, intellectual, or organizational interests, while others are driven by questions of fairness, research ethics, or social justice.

My own individual engagements touch on a mix of concerns and experiences, but my greatest partners and teachers have been librarians working on scholarly communications issues and projects. As an ethnographer working in historically disadvantaged communities, I am very sensitive to the ethics of OA but I am also very much aligned with librarians and the work they do for scholars and in the public interest. My OA work aims to reduce (rather than increase) the ways in which large (ever more consolidated) multinational corporations control the dissemination of our work. (Many OA advocates are not at all focused on such macroeconomic concerns. As I say, different motivations are at work for different individuals and groups.)

Somewhat separate from OA, I want to strengthen those university press [and small scale commercial] publishers who have long supported our fields and I am especially eager to champion those university presses who are experimenting with open access themselves.

I have long cared about the serials crisis and now that the world is thinking more critically about student debt, I want us all to realize the direct relationship between the scholarly communications system, and the scholarly society system, and the neoliberalization of the American research university. Skyrocketing tuition is a consequence of public disinvestment in public universities like mine and yours. Leasing (we no longer purchase) toll access scholarship at ever higher costs from exceedingly profitable commercial firms (and their society partners) is not helping close the inequality gap in higher education. It is hardly the only factor involved (ex: think health care costs) but it is one of the few factors in which faculty and graduate students have a direct role to play—as authors, as disciplinary policy shapers, as peer-reviewers, as editors, etc. As contributors to the scholarly publishing system, we have choices available to us. We can make our work open in a number of ways and we can support and encourage those whose values and commitments align with out own. As I noted in my remarks to the 2010 AcademiX conference on open access, the main problems that we face now are not technical; they’re human factors problems of the sort that we have been discussing. As I’ll try to suggest in my presentation on the Open Folklore project at the upcoming AAA meetings, librarians remain among our greatest partners and allies in this work.

To be continued…  (See Part 1 here, and Part 3, here)