Take for example this letter from Mohit Chandra, a partner with KPMG, to “India’s Graduating Classes.” Many of his complaints would be just as valid of students I’ve met in Philadelphia as they are of students I’ve met in Ahmedabad or Taipei. It seems to me that there are two possible explanations for this failure. The first is that the institutions of global higher education are particularly unproductive and inefficient at producing the type of students they wish to produce. The second is that they don’t actually wish to produce such students in the first place. I’d like to argue that the latter statement is closer to the truth.

Let us look at the skills that Chandra wishes to find in new employees: “language skills, in thirst for knowledge, in true professionalism and, finally, in thinking creatively and non-hierarchically.” In reading this list I can’t help but think of Bourdieu and Passeron’s argument that education primarily serves to cultivate a

misrecognition of the truth of the legitimate culture as the dominant cultural arbitrary, whose reproduction contributes towards reproducing the power relations.

The skills Chandra lists are elite skills largely cultivated in the home long before arriving at the university. Bourdieu and Passeron argue that schooling exists largely to “inculcate the fait accompli of the legitimacy of the dominant culture” rather than actually training students to cultivate these skills.

I think this tension explains the tremendous popularity of the Bollywood Film 3 Idiots.

Almost every single Taiwanese person I know has seen this film, which was also a huge hit in India. The film is about three engineering students at a highly competitive university who refuse to learn the official curriculum, instead evidencing those skills which Chandra claims KPMG is looking for. My point being that there is a certain recognition in the success of this film that the skills being taught in universities are not the skills people really need to compete in the new economy.

When my wife and I were shooting our last documentary in India we sometimes stayed in a guest house on the campus of an engineering school. Some of the students there knew that there was a visiting anthropologist and they would wait outside our guest house late at night when we got back from shooting, wishing to talk until I could no longer keep my eyes open. Like the “3 idiots” in the film, they were desperate to get the education they feel they needed rather than the official education being provided by the university.

One often reads that high end management companies and the like (places like KPMG) like students with advanced degrees in anthropology. While few people with advanced degrees in anthropology are interested in working in management, I think one could make a good argument that an anthropology degree is much closer to the kind of training Chandra is looking for than that provided by the engineering and management schools which train most of his actual employees.

I think Bourdieu and Passeron do a good job describing the problem, but I don’t think they adequately explain how such institutional failure continues to be reproduced on an ever-expanding global scale. It might be that KPMG is the exception and that there really is a huge need for low level technocrats of the kind actually produced by most schools and that elite skills would actually be a problem for the companies seeking to hire these workers. But I find such a market-driven answer equally unconvincing. I tend to feel that there is a contradiction between the needs of employers qua employers and the needs of employers qua capitalists. As employers they need these skills, but as capitalists too many people with these skills would be a threat. I think that the current state of global higher education is the result of the working out of these contradictions.

The human consequences of the bitification of atoms go far beyond my bourgeois consumption. This shift, or what is could simply be called digitalization, when paired with their very material transportation systems or networked communication technologies, combines to form a powerful force that impacts local and global democracies and economies.

What are the local and political economics of granularity in the space shared between the fiduciary and the communicative? To understand the emergent political economy of the practices and discourses unifying around mobile media and digital money we need a shared language around the issue of granularity.

Granularity

Granularity is the reduction of symbols to binary-type simplicity such as lines of computer code or small economic integers. Granularity means to break down money or media into symbolic and quantitative units for digital delivery and reconstitution. Granularity and networks are what gives bit-based media and money its mobile advantage over its cousins–film stock that needs to be “bicycled” to theaters and precious metals that need to be stored in fortified treasuries. Granularity is the physical principle that allows the discourses of money and media to meet. With granularity come two conflicting social worlds –the financialization as well as the democratization of media and money.

More philosophically, the media/money verisimilitude reveals the already tenuous analytical separation of thought and action, discourse and practice, and rationalities and tactics.

Financialization and Democratization of Money/Media

Digital money and mobile media, in a state of fine granularity, are symbolically opened for innovative as well as manipulative financialization and potentially wide democratization. Granularity, by refining things into ever-smaller units, increases the opportunities for access to previously closed systems. On the one hand, this can be empowering as peer-to-peer media and financial transactions can increase and, for a time, transpire under the radar of regulators and speculators. On the other hand, media/money granularity can also result in “flexible accumulation,” the post-nation manufacturing of information/financial/mathematical tools such as seen in the derivatives market that is increasingly difficult to regulate, litigate, or access if you are a citizen.

Digital Money as Democratizing

The granularity of digital money can create opportunities for access by materially poor people to small investment-able capital. This form of capital democratization is dependent upon new technologies and networks. Digital money, largely a numerical system within ornate cultural contexts, is easily made granular and digitally shared via phone or internet from person to person, micro-lender to person, and employer to person. Such transactions on unregulated communication networks has democratized new forms of money sharing, saving, and transfer.

While it isn’t popular in the United States, mobile granular financing has exploded in Kenya. For instance, Vodaphone affiliate Safaricom started m-Pesa, a mobile money transfer in Kenya in 2003. M-Pesa has 12 million users out of 17 million mobile phone users representing 70% of the mobile market in Kenya and 21% of the Kenyan GDP flows through the system, wrote mPay Connect founder Menekse Gencer in 2011. It works and it’s profitable for Vodaphone shareholders. And yet its commercialization balances any breathless optimism about m-Pesa’s democratizing impact.

This democratization of capital provides an opportunity to re-acquaint ourselves with the overbearing symbology that is money. It also invites us to reconsider basic issues of financial autonomy and agency. How will mobile money challenge, magnify, or articulate with local customs? As digital currencies evolve will they be pegged to national or international banks? How will they be regulated and by whom? How are they insured and what backs their legitimacy? As these pragmatic questions are answered and applied digital money will likely move further from democratization and nearer to financialization.

Financialization of Digital Money

Few have bank accounts but the 1.7 billion materially poor people will have a cell phone in 2012. This phone can be used to make calls, many can take photos and videos, upload them to the internet, and, increasingly, receive and give money. Even before this form of digital money there were banks micro-lending. Following CK Prahalad’s claim that the collective material wealth at the bottom of pyramid can make development profitable, a number of microfinance organizations went into non-profit “business.” Kiva, who started in 2005, the same year as YouTube, is the most recognizable microlender for Westerners. Kiva founders were inspired by a talk by Muhammad Yunus at Stanford. Yunus, of course, started Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the first microfinance organization. Kiva, Grameen, Yunus and the following, Banco Compartamos, are all vigorously successful and have all claimed to alleviate poverty. Such philanthrocapitalism is rich with contradictions. The World Bank, for instance, is the largest micro-lender in the world. The problematic financialization of granular money is evident in Banco Compartamos that started as a non-profit micro-lending bank to materially poor Oaxacans, took a shot at becoming private in an IPO, raised a billion dollars, and made its shareholders wealthy. Yunus was outraged by the high interest rates and simple bald privatization of the now profitable banco.

While the granularity of digital money can create capital access and capital democratization, it can also create access for corporate financialization. By financialization I refer basically to commercial or market tactics and discourses; of tacking profit generating financial instruments onto each grain of digital money and a charge onto each node it its circuitous pathway through the technological and social network. This is an important facet of “flexible accumulation” which refers both to the global mobility of capital as well as the instrumentalization of social life.

Mobile Media Democratization

The democratization of digital money is spiritually linked to the tactical and discursive interventions of local entrepreneurs who “hacked” into public systems –satellite television, electricity, water– that had been privatized. My research into the history of cable and satellite “guerrilla television” producers reveals how techniques and rationalities are mobilized by marginalized producers to gain access to systems of media power closed by economic or political power. The process goes something like this. A disruptive network communication technology evolves out of tinkerer communities (radio, cable television) or large-scale federal investment (satellite, internet). The indigenous or local innovators are either responsible for the technology, as in the case of radio and cable television, or adapt to exploit it like early internet hackers, public access television producers, and phone phreaks. Examples include TVTV, a psychedelic television producer community who created an opening on cable television in the 1970s and Deep Dish TV, a progressive producer collective who exploited inexpensive satellite rents to distribute their anti-war message. They used their policy discourse and interventionary practices to exploit an opening in an otherwise closed system. These opening can provide the context for the democratization of (capital) production. These examples of media democratization are from the pre-digital phase, how does granularity impact media democracy as well as the financialization of media?

Mobile Media Financialization

Granularity impacts two forms of media financialization: personalization and fragmentation. The obsession the Google founders Page and Brin have with artificial intelligence is dutifully documented by Nick Carr in The Big Switch. They hope to know enough about each of us through recording our search records to be able to recommend consumer solutions to life. This they call personalization, the individualization of search. This ‘give-them-what-they-appear-to-like’ mentality includes searches we do on politics as Eli Pariser explains, keeping us in homogenous “filter bubbles.” Just yesterday it was reported that Google’s personalization ambition has been branded as “Search,  Plus Your World” to honor how they merge their search data with the person data we freely give them on their fledgling social network Google+. The point is that every granular piece of personal data has a price. It is on these grains of identity that Google and Facebook hang their future business plans.

Google is financializing another stream of granular data, the video clip. Beginning back in 2007, I began documenting the transformation of amateur to professional YouTubers. By the end of 2011, this transformation is now complete and YouTube is fully prepared for the convergence of broadband home entertainment by creating the Partner program, buying Next New Networks, and recently enshrining 100 top video producers. Many of the professionalized channels are vloggers whose work is not granular in the traditional sense of the term (micro-payments or lines of code) but it is granular in reference to the lengthy documentaries, over-cooked television talk shows, and studio call in shows of the past. They are short and often include ever more granular clips. Ray William Johnson, the most subscribed and viewed YouTube celebrity built his business around making fun of little clips. Kind of like America’s Funniest Home Videos for tweens. Taken as a whole, from the semi-famous vloggers making almost a million dollars a year from revenue sharing with Google to the one-hit wonder who uploads an addictively watchable cat video and who make a few thousand dollars for Google and herself, granularity is part of the financialization as well as democratization of visual media.

Possible Social Consequences

What are the possible global and local impacts of the theory that granularity is turning money and media into objects easily interchangeable, financialized, and democratized? In essence I am concerned with the manufacturing and exploitation of desire, the commercialization of bio-politics, and the death of democracy. I worry about the emergence of a corporation capable of exploiting the verisimilitude of money/media and developing financial/media instruments that can control and monetized the smallest units of both symbolic systems. I worry about the capacities of these money/media corporations to manufacture ubiquitous entertainment environments that can extract financial rewards based on phenomenologically inconsequential but altogether quantifiable granular units of sensual attention. I worry about the media, which includes journalism, being colonized by financial interests to such a degree that there is no media (and no journalism) without a financial product immediately inscribed in its metadata. That would negate any democratization granularity would produce.

And yet, I have faith in the rationalities and techniques of the indigenous innovators, phone phreakers, “guerrilla television” producers, and hacktivists to intervene in this worrisome future.

This post is largely inspired by Anke Schwittay’s excellent 2011 article, “The financial inclusion assemblages: Subjects, technics, rationalities” in Critique of Anthropology 31[4]:381-401.

]]> http://savageminds.org/2012/01/11/digital-money-mobile-media-and-the-consequences-of-granularity/feed/ 1 http://savageminds.org/2011/11/07/buffalaxing-in-reverse-in-taiwan/ http://savageminds.org/2011/11/07/buffalaxing-in-reverse-in-taiwan/#comments Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:50:03 +0000 Kerim http://savageminds.org/?p=6299 According to the Urban Dictonary “buffalaxing” is a term which comes from a YouTube user named Buffalax who is famous for writing fake English lyrics to foreign songs which (to an English speaker who doesn’t understand the original language) sound like they could be the actual lyrics to the song. You can find this kind of thing by searching YouTube for “buffalax” or for “misheard lyrics.” Some of these are funnier than others, and many are simply offensive. The reason I bring it up is that buffalaxing is very popular in Taiwan, and I wanted to share a new music video which has some fun with this meme. But first some context…

Let’s start with two of the more famous songs which have been given misheard Chinese lyrics. The first is “Golimar” from the Telugu movie “Donga“:

To give you a sense of how this goes, the word “golimar” is translated as “幹你媽“ which is pronounced “gan ni ma” and literally means “fuck your mother.” The rest isn’t much more sophisticated than that.

Just to show how popular this song is in Taiwan, remember our guest post by Futuru Tsai about traditional Amis song and dance? Well, here’s footage I took of Futuru and his adopted Amis age set performing Golimar during last year’s Amis Harvest Festival:

(I highly recommend Futuru’s film “Amis Hip Hop” about the role of contemporary song and dance in the festival.)

A second, equally popular video for misheard lyrics is Daler Mehndi’s Tunak Tunak Tun, which is a popular internet meme in it’s own right.

OK. Enough context. Here’s the music video I wanted to talk about. I’ll let you watch it first:

What I like about this video is that it is buffalaxing in reverse. The song was written, in part, with the kind of fake lyrics one would come to expect from a buffalaxed movie, except those are actually the original lyrics of the song. Although, as a mainstream song the lyrics are not dirty, they are often just nonsensical (represented in the subtitles with the use of simplified and gibberish characters). Even better, the video comes with Hindi subtitles which I’ve been told look as if the original song lyrics were run through Google Translate.

Finally, a word about Bollywood movies in Taiwan. Unlike Indonesians or Russians, Taiwanese don’t watch Bollywood. Most of my students here would only have seen Bollywood movie songs as buffalaxed YouTube videos. However, there is one notable exception. Everyone I know in Taiwan and, as far as I can tell, the rest of East Asia as well, seems to have seen the comedy “3 Idiots.” I think the criticism of the education system in that film is felt even more strongly in East Asia than it is in India.

Eco-chic, like many other socio-cultural manifestations of neoliberalism is rife with contradiction. The fundamental contradiction being that it is a social justice movement within consumer capitalism. The producers of eco-chic goods and experiences are structured by capitalism’s profit motive. Likewise consumers of eco-chic goods and experiences are motivated by ideals that try to transcend or correct the ecological or deleterious human impacts of capitalism. Thus both producer and consumer of eco-chic are caught in a contradiction between their social justice drives and their suspension in the logic of neoliberalism. Eco chic events such as Burning Man and television networks such as Al Gore’s Current TV also express the fundamental contradiction between the social and the entrepreneurial in social entrepreneurialism. How do the contradictions within eco-chic represent themselves in American West Coast’s cultural expressions such as Burning Man and Current TV?

I don’t study eco-chic but it is a reoccurring motif. The specific location for my ethnographic encounter with eco-chic is the annual Burning Man festival that I have been attending since 2001. Combining countercultural ideals and Web 2.0 notions of sharing with ecological mindfulness and new primalism, Burning Man is the quintessential event in North America for the eco-chic radical. Following Fred Turner—and I’ve stated this before–that Burning Man is a ‘sociotechnical commons’—the cultural infrastructure for the digital media industries of California. Burning Man is expensive, catering to the Silicon Valley intelligencia who are eco-chic and have the finances to explore themselves along with 50,000 people at Black Rock City, a temporary metropole we construct for a delirious week of personal expression and community celebration on the barren alkaline plains of a Nevada desert a half-days drive from San Francisco. Thus, like most iterations of cultural and community identity in neoliberalism, Burning Man is rich with contradictions. The economic costs and carbon footprint required to freely express oneself and live briefly in alliance with nature and community and supposedly outside of capitalism, being only the most obvious contradiction.

Ethnographic research requires specificity so I have focused on one manifestation of the eco-chic culture of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Burning Man. Since 2006 I have been producing television documentaries and conducting participant observation with the global television network Current TV who has been exclusively covering Burning Man since 2005. Current TV, founded by famed eco-chic Vice President Al Gore, is based on the mission to democratize television production through broadcasting citizen journalism on television screens around the world. Current TV employees, of whom I have interviewed many, express eco-chic values of sustainable coolness as well as a technoutopian idealism about how new media is going to improve democracy and heal cultural and ecological fractions. Thus, like Burning Man, Current TV is full of contradictions, namely the attempt to instigate democratic processes within the most capitalized and hierarchical cultural industry–global television.

How are the contradictions of neoliberalism mediated by an eco-chic culture of media producers, digital designers, and artists spatio-temporally situated between the radically expressive neo-primitive festival Burning Man and Al Gore’s media democratizing global television network Current TV? Both of these sites of cultural production reflect the contradictions that befall the high tech cultural industrial centers of Silicon Valley in the shadow of the countercultural epicenters of San Francisco and the Bay Area. These contradictions can be summed up in the contradiction between doing good and doing well, being ecologically sensitive while being hedonistic, being trendy while being independent, and being a creative producer while also being a conscious consumer. These contradictions don’t fly. As an anthropologist I seek to critically assess these contradictions while exploring the social, historical, economic, and technological affordances that rationalize and valorize eco-chic as a valid cultural identity as well as an impacting consumer movement.

Whether eco-chic, Burning Man, and Current TV are developments of social justice within corporate culture or merely new incarnations of neoliberalism’s sophisticated production of surplus from the social justice energies of people is not an empirical question. Capitalism is fraught with contradictions, the primary one being the drive to enhance life for many while retaining a surplus for the few. The point of this research is to document how these contradictions are mediated at specific times and spaces, namely, early 21st century Silicon Valley and its proxy locations like Hollywood and Burning Man, in accordance with the institutional value sets and technological assemblages of these specific spaces.

On a more meta-level what does it mean for a larger anthropological project when it recognizes these trends in values? Chris Kelty recently talked about how “transhumanism”–that utopian value for immortality through science and technology–continues to appear throughout his research with computer scientists, hackers, and other geeks. He isn’t doing research on “transhumanists” but their values crop up consistently in the course of doing his other work. Eco-chic is like this I assume for many scholars investigating Western liberal elites. It isn’t the focus but the wider socio-cultural context for the research. When I recognize these larger patterns that appear to unify subjects across a field of seemingly disparate scenes I get that rush that I’ve finally found “culture.” Is it, or merely a typification?

Karl Polanyi, in a much lauded book that is getting its fair share of attention in these days of economic malaise, argued that the economy should, ideally, serve the interests of society.  Proponents of the self-regulating market basically argued the reverse: that society should in effect be structured according to the supposedly rational logic of the market.  These same sentiments continue to be promulgated by economists, politicians, and pundits today–these are the proponents of the “free market” who seek to fix the economy by cutting it free from the mores of government, rules, and regulations.  Such an arrangement, for Polanyi, was particularly troubling: “Ultimately, that is why the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of a society as an adjunct to the market.  Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in economic systems” (2001:60).

Tourism development is a particularly relevant case in which specific places are made to serve the demands and needs of wider economic markets.  Since my research is in Mexico, I tend to focus on places like Cancun, Acapulco, Chichen Itza, and Los Cabos–but this argument applies elsewhere as well.  Tourism markets go through trends and fads, just like any other market.  One of the most prominent trends in Mexican tourism development these days focuses on luxury and exclusivity (see Berger and Wood 2010).  Los Cabos, which is exemplified by the coastal tourism city of Cabo San Lucas,  may well be one of the new models of tourism, with its focus on high end hotels, marinas, restaurants, and golf courses.

The place where Los Cabos sits today was once little more than a relatively small fishing community on the southern tip of  the Baja California peninsula.  This was in the 1970s and early 1980s.  Today, it has been reshaped–geographically, economically, and architecturally–to attract tourists from around the world (although most come from the United States).  While Los Cabos may indeed bring a certain amount of jobs for Mexican workers (many of them migrate to tourism zones in search of work), make no mistake: it is a place that has been designed to cash in on market trends.  Tourism zones cater to tourists, and they tend to benefit the politicians, investors, and developers who own the land, businesses, hotels, marinas, and golf courses where those tourists spend their money.

These places may be known internally as idyllic, beautiful, and desirable destinations, but they are also notorious for their high socio-economic inequality, if not outright social segregation (see Lopez et al 2006; Clancy 2001; Castellanos 2010; Hiernaux 1999; Wilson 2008).  Places like Cancun and Los Cabos are literally ringed with colonias–urban or semi-urban neighborhoods, settlements, etc–where the standards of living are far below that of the tourism zone itself.  This arrangement is by no means accidental, since these communities service the tourism sector through low wage jobs (see Castellanos 2010 for some specific insight into this relationship).  These are the kinds of images and realities, of course, that you aren’t going to find in airline magazines.  But they are just as much a part of “the tourism experience” as the sandy beaches and comfortable hotels, even if the vast majority of tourists have no idea.  It’s all part of the structure, so to speak.

At this point you may be thinking: Ok, I know where you’re going with this.  You might think that I am just another “critical anthropologist” making the argument that tourism development is “problematic,” and that we need to rethink it, and so on.  Maybe we can move past that at some point.  I am not against tourism development per se, and I am certainly not going to claim that all tourism development is somehow exploitative, negative, and unwanted, or that local people are always passive victims of the grist mill that is economic development.  In fact, many people that I have talked to in various parts of Mexico have some pretty optimistic or hopeful ideas about the potential of tourism development.

Yes, tourism is full of complications and problems, but for many people it translates to opportunities, money, and jobs.  The problems arise when communities or places are completely restructured or transformed according to external ideals, desires, and expectations.  So, in a sense, it often comes down to politics and power: the ability (legally, socially, economically) to fully participate (or not) in the development process itself.  This is based upon what I have seen (and read) so far–and these are exactly the kinds of issues that I will be exploring in my upcoming fieldwork.

All of this comes back to the issue Polanyi brought up way back in 1944: should the economy serve society, or should we allow society to be restructured in such a way that it serves the needs and whims of the economy (i.e. the market)?  In the case of many tourism developments in Mexico, what happens to places like Cancun and Los Cabos when market trends shift?  What happens when places become passé, when they not are no longer the hot destinations?  What then of all the hotels, marinas, and other structures that were specifically designed to appeal to one moment in time?  What happens to all of the people who migrate across the country to find work in or around the tourism industry when the flow of moneyed travelers dries up?  In essence, these tourist spaces are examples of ordering society according to the logic of the market, rather than the long term interests or needs of society (communities who bear the brunt of tourism, etc) on the whole.

I don’t really have any firm conclusions at this point, since many of the issues and questions that I am dealing with here need more empirical and ethnographic investigation.  But I find this idea of making places according to market trends–rather than the needs of community and society–to be particular interesting and useful.  Landscapes and communities throughout Mexico–and beyond–are in the midst of dramatic transformations that seek to remake places to draw in tourists.  These tourists are in reality an abstract mass of traveling consumers whose tastes are both fickle and constantly in flux.  One day a place can be a tourist “hot spot,” and the next it can be almost completely forgotten (reminiscent of the plot in Alex Garland’s novel “The Beach“).  Polanyi–and the contemporary economic anthropologists who are following in his tracks–are definitely on to something here: the ways in which we think about and enact society in relation to the market isn’t just some abstract, theoretical issue.

So who is served by tourism development in Mexico?  Well, let me put it this way: If tourism development is only geared toward satisfying the exogenous desires of tourists (i.e. market demand), with little concern for the interests of communities themselves, it seems that society will indeed be served–as curious, quaint, nostalgic tidbits to be consumed like a daily special and then unceremoniously cast aside when the next best thing arrives on the map.  As Polanyi argues: a society subordinated to the unfettered whims of the market, rather than the reverse, is nothing more than a recipe for conflict, inequality, and, ultimately, disaster.  In the global shell game that is international tourism development, the interests and long-term welfare of society should be a primary concern–rather than the market–since the much idealized “free hand” of Adam Smith sure isn’t going to provide any jobs when formerly desirable places like Cancun (and, someday, Los Cabos)  are no longer gracing the headlines of the latest trend-setting travel magazines, TV shows, and web sites.

*Why yes, this is indeed a not so subtle reference to a famous short story and an episode of the Twilight Zone, all at once.

References

Berger, Dina, and Andrew Grant Wood.  2010.  Holiday in Mexico.  Durham: Duke University Press.

Castellanos, M. Bianet.  2010.  A Return to Servitude.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Clancy, Michael.  2001.  Exporting Paradise.  New York: Pergamon.

Hiernaux, Daniel Nicholas.  1999.  Cancun Bliss.  In The Tourist City.  Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein, eds.  Pp. 124-142.  New Haven: Yale University Press.

López-López, Álvaro, Judith Cukier, and Álvaro Sánchez Crispín. 2006. Segregation of Tourist Space in Los Cabos, Mexico. Tourism Geographies Vol. 8(4): 359-379.

Polanyi, Karl.  2001[1944].  The Great Transformation.  Boston: Beacon Press.

Wilson, Tamar Diana.  2008. Economic and Social Impacts of Tourism in Mexico. Latin American Perspectives 160 35(3): 37-52.

The affective loop is dizzying as it moves us between distant places and local homes, political upheavals and natural disasters, raging storms and individual stories, the serious and the absurd. Unable to catch my breath between blows or steady myself according to some sense of scale, I feel like so much has happened since the tsunami struck. And yet, I don’t know what to make of any of it.  Are we just bracing ourselves for the next thing?

In an April article entitled “The Half-life of Disaster” Brian Massumi discusses how this media cycle leads us into a perpetual state of foreboding that brings together natural, economic and political threat perception in a configuration that fuels what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism”. The horror is never resolved or replaced; rather, it is archived, infinitely accessible over the Internet.  Cast into the web of other events, the unendurable tragedy of a particular event dissipates, or as Massumi says, “it decays”.  In today’s catastrophic mediashpere, observes Massumi, the half-life of disaster is at most two weeks.

Why have we let the situation in Japan recede into the background of other “big news”?  Massumi and others suggest that this “post-shock pre-posturing” increasingly delegates collective response to the national security apparatus, obscures the structural causes of “natural” disaster (Katrina as well as Fukushima illustrate this point well), and feeds the increasingly centralized global economy which capitalizes on the instability created by the very disasters it helps potentiate.

While I discussed responsibility and resistance in relation to mass-mediated affect in my last post, here I want to offer another mode of response: stepping out of the affective loop.  While feeling with others in the context of suffering is perhaps the only appropriate response when faced with the immediacy of another’s pain, undoing the social causes of suffering requires a continuously engaged critical perspective. I’d like to offer that the ongoing events in Japan are terribly important to us right now in an unfolding global context.

What’s perhaps most important about the aftermath of the disaster was not what happened in the first two weeks, but what is happening twelve weeks out.  Not only does the US public need to step out of the media-driven affective whirlpool, but we need to step back into the global conversation about energy sustainability and the political, social, economic, and environmental disasters brought about in the effort to maintain the current levels of profit.

The meltdowns at Fukushima temporarily unmask the social and environmental dangers always present in nuclear power.  Likewise, the uprisings in the Middle East reveal the grave economic disparities and instability generated in oil-based economies.  We mustn’t let these revelatory and revolutionary moments pass away.

As proposed by Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis in a letter addressed to Japan, the “international capitalist power-structure” is terrified that the disempowered will seize upon the explosive political potential of these moments.  Their letter suggests that if disaster capitalism runs on an ever-present low-level threat perception, its leading industrial sector—energy—runs on the public’s perception that everything is fine and dandy:

Company men and politicians are aware that the disaster at Fukushima is a tremendous blow to the legitimacy of nuclear power and in a way the legitimacy of capitalist production. A tremendous ideological campaign is under way to make sure that it does not become the occasion for a global revolt against nuclear power and more important for a process of revolutionary change. The fact that the nuclear disaster in Japan is taking place in concomitance with the spreading of insurrectional movements throughout the oil regions of North Africa and the Middle East undoubtedly adds to the determination to establish against all evidence that everything is under control.

Claims like these and others (insert link) about “ideological campaigns” in the name “global revolt” may be motivated by a romantic view of political agency. But the history of nuclear power in the US and Japan suggests that Federici and Caffentzis are right to expose the neoliberal interests that inform the framing of recent events.

Historically, the nuclear-friendly PR machine (with Eisenhower and the “Atoms for Peace” campaign at the helm) played a huge role in Japan’s acceptance of nuclear power.  Of course it did.  How in the world, we might ask, would a country like Japan—the only country ever gutted by a nuclear weapon—come to accept nuclear powered energy at the behest of the very country that dropped the bomb??

Historian Peter Kuznick answers precisely this question and explains the process of propaganda and acceptance in a recent essay.  Putting Japan’s nuclear history Pointo perspective, Kuznick writes: “their nuclear program was born not only in the fantasy of clean, safe power, but also in the willful forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal.”  While the human scale of suffering and loss initiated in northeastern Japan will always remain incomprehensible, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown are being fashioned at this very moment into historically comprehensible events. The social, political and economic stakes in these repertoires of fantasy and forgetting are high.

Most blatantly, perhaps, we find these repertoires rehearsed in mainstream media stories about Fukushima.  Last week President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea and Chinese premiere Wen Jiabao visited Japan to speak with Prime Minister Naoto Kan in a tripartite summit in order to discuss Japan’s handling of the nuclear crisis and foster trade relations.  The conservative Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan’s most widely circulated paper, and one with long-held stakes in the nuclear industry…from the time it conspired with the CIA to promote nuclear development in Japan in the 1950s up until the present day) wrote:

Kan was particularly enthusiastic about realizing the visit by the three leaders to a quake-hit area… Some in the government expressed anxiety over security for the leaders. But Kan said: “The sight of us three eating produce from Fukushima Prefecture will definitely be reported overseas. That’d be the best protection we can get against harmful rumors,” and the plan went forward.

Kan links “security” to “protection … against harmful rumors” and asserts that foreign press coverage will provide the protection. One must assume that these “rumors” consist of statements about the ongoing harm by radioactive materials to people in the area of Fukushima and the hazards of all forms of nuclear energy more broadly.  By using the term “rumor” Kan is delegitimizing these claims, while simultaneously taking them seriously enough to situate their threat within the discourse of national security.  Regarding the stakes at play in controlling this information dissemination, Japanese scholar Yoshihiko Ikegami writes:

The government calls the information shared on the internet “rumors” and repeatedly urges the public not to believe them. In addition, a public advertising organization called Advertising Council Japan is airing a TV commercial asking people not to believe rumors and not to buy-up. (The head of the organization is the president of TEPCO.) The commentators in news programs single-mindedly repeat similar messages.

These widespread attempts to dismiss information circulating in the public sphere as “rumors” has led some anti-nuclear activists to re-appropriate the term in explicit calls for revolution.

The linking of rumor and revolution, however, is probably not the most pertinent point about Kan’s statements.  By shifting the role of “security” from that of protecting individual human bodies (Lee and Wen) to that of protecting the nuclear industry—and by exposing these same bodies to potentially poisonous produce—Kan’s statements foregrounds the devaluation of human life that Federici and Caffentzis attribute to capitalism: “What we are witnessing, most dramatically, in the response to the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, especially in the US, is the beginning of an era in which capitalism is dropping any humanitarian pretense and refusing any commitment to the protection of human life.”

If supporting Japan and Fukushima means eating poisoned produce, it is because maintaining current economic trajectories and the continued use of nuclear energy has become more important than the well-being of individual bodies.

At the time of the meeting between the three leaders, the Japanese government had raised acceptable levels of yearly radiation exposure for children from 1 mmSv (the limit set by the WHO) to 20mmSv and was failing to pay for removal of contaminated topsoil at schools.  Children were regularly being exposed to levels of radiation allegedly higher than Chernobyl and traces of radioactive material were being found in the breast milk of women as far away as Chiba and Ibaraki.

Like those displaced by the tsunami, many of the 80,000 evacuees from the 20km radius around Fukushima lacked adequate shelter and provisions.  What’s more, if human life has been undervalued, non-human animal life even more so.   Evacuees were not allowed to take their animal companions with them when they evacuated.  Despite appeals that intensified during the weekend of the summit (and continue thousands of cats and dogs, and ten thousands of farm animals have been starving to death.  Meanwhile, according to prejudices (with historical precedent) about nuclear contamination, people with license plates from Fukushima are being refused service at gas stations and turned away from hotels. Coding discrimination as “reputation damage,” the government is able to claim that supporting the people of Fukushima means ignoring exposure and buying their products rather than worrying over their exposure and accepting them into our communities.  (Japanese Political scientist Chigaya Kinoshita writes about these dual modes of containment in an essay about the uglier aspects of civil society.) In the midst of all this, the three leaders chewed their veggies and posed for the press.

On cue, as if obliging Kan’s earlier statements and this perverse show of solidarity, the first paragraph of the New York Times’ brief coverage of the meeting reads: “The leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea publicly munched on farm produce grown near the stricken Japanese nuclear plant on Saturday in a show of solidarity with Japan’s recovery efforts.”  Nowhere mentioning that this was the fourth in a series of annual meetings since 2008 intended to foster economic relations between the three countries, the article eventually continues, “Before entering the shelter, a converted gymnasium, Mr. Kan steered the group to a table displaying strawberries, cucumbers and other produce grown in Fukushima Prefecture. The leaders, who did not appear to have been surprised by the photo op, smiled and nibbled gamely. “Very delicious,” Mr. Wen said.”

The tone of the Times’ article seems slightly bemused as it acceptingly acknowledges, along with the Chinese and Korean leaders, that this was a highly choreographed theatrical spectacle. What’s troubling in such a tone, however, is the implication that an acknowledgement of posturing somehow exempts the reporting from any responsibility to analyze the scene—both what it stages and obscures.

Why doesn’t the New York Times explain exactly how munching on cucumbers displays solidarity with the people who can’t get the government to clear away debris, rescue their animals, and remove dangerous dirt from children’s playgrounds? Of course these are the very things obscured in the staged scene.  The Times seems to capitulate to the regime of “everything’s fine” that ensures Kan’s “security”.  No matter how ironic the tone, this article portrays solidarity as participating in an anti-panic business-as-usual patriotism, exactly the sort critiqued by Kinoshita in the essay mentioned earlier. While catastrophe and panic were appealing headlines in the initial weeks of the disaster, now in the moment’s fading half-life, they seem to have no place.

Addendum:

Since writing this piece the New York Times has just published an article that exposes the government’s exploitation of poor rural towns and the means through which it makes them financially dependent on nearby reactors.  Although this coverage finally starts uncovering the secrets silence hides, the emphasis on “a lack of widespread grass-roots opposition in the communities around [Japan’s] 54 nuclear reactors” fosters the impression that there isn’t much in the way of anti-nuclear activism taking place in Japan.  Hopefully, the New York Times will start covering the massive demonstrations (of scales rarely seen in contemporary Japan) like the one on April 10^th that brought more that 17,500 people onto the streets of Tokyo.  Cries of protest from the public have brought a halt to development of the Hamaoka Nuclear Plant, and forced the government to revoke the change in acceptable radiation levels for children.  Until these stories earn headlines in mainstream media, I ask you to find projects like Japan – Fissures in the Planetary Apparatus which is translating critical essays by Japanese activists and intellectuals about the ongoing situation in Japan.

As the contours of the disaster accrete into what is undoubtedly a pivotal event, the larger frameworks within which meaning hinges are highly contested.  How the disaster, now officially called the Great East Japan Earthquake, gets spun will depend on which historical and political contexts are acknowledged, and which are ignored.

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.

Secondly, I specifically wanted to link to two articles in the first issue: On Neoliberalism by Sherry Ortner and Timepass And Boredom In Modern India by Chris Fuller.

Ortner’s article starts with a quote from Marshall Sahlins: “Whatever happened to ‘Late Capitalism’? It became neo-liberalism.” Some of our readers may not remember the phrase “Late Capitalism” which gained popularity after Ernst Mandel’s book of that name came out in the late seventies. David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity owes a lot to Mandel. Ortner doesn’t dispute Sahlins, but suggests that there are some reasons why we might want to use a new word:

I want to make it clear that the economy known as “late capitalism” in the 80s and 90s was not really much more benign than the economy we now call “neoliberalism.” Either/both emerged from the dual turn from Fordism and Keynesianism, that is, from the metaphoric social contracts that had protected industrial labor as well as the citizenry in general from the worst excesses of capitalism. But in the 80s and 90s, accounts of late capitalism were closely tied up with “globalization,” and while globalization was certainly understood to have its down sides (labor outsourcing, unemployment, and deindustrialization at the sending end; extreme labor exploitation at the receiving end, etc.), there was also a fairly influential set of arguments about the ways in which other aspects of globalization (flows of technology, information, media, etc.) could be seen as positive and liberating (see especially Appadurai 1990). Globalization remains real and indeed as multi-layered and multi-valent as ever (see Hannerz 1996; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Tsing 2005). But neoliberalism is now embedded in a different, and more consistently dark, set of stories, to which we now turn.

I’m not a huge fan of Klein’s work, but I really like Harvey’s and I find his brief definition of neoliberalism quite satisfying:

Harvey offers a clear definition of neoliberalism as a system of “accumulation by dispossession,” which has four main pillars: 1) the “privatization and commodification” of public goods; 2) “financialization,” in which any kind of good (or bad) can be turned into an instrument of economic speculation; 3) the “management and manipulation of crises” (as above); and 4) “state redistribution,” in which the state becomes an agent of the upward redistribution of wealth…

At the same time, using a new word has its downsides. For one thing, the phrase neoliberalism lets good-old-fashioned “liberalism” off the hook too easily. It also obscures some of the continuities that exist across various changes in the Capitalist system. A great book to read criticizing some of the excess fear/adulation over globalization is Doug Henwood’s After the New Economy, usefully discussed in this long Crooked Timber post by Kieran Healy. But I still think that Harvey is on to something in identifying neoliberalism as a political agenda which defines the current time, and I particularly like how he shows that neoliberalism is not purely a US-based conspiracy but something that has emerged simultaneously, if somewhat differently, in countries like China. Ortner ads further complexity to the story by drawing on recent ethnographic works on the subject.

I don’t have so much to say about the second article, except that I recommend also listening to Craig Jeffery’s CHIASMOS talk on his book Timepass: Youth, Class and The Politics of Waiting in India which is the subject of Chris Fuller’s review. (And if you don’t subscribe to the CHIASMOS podcast you should!)

I’ll be presenting a paper during Friday’s panel session, “Uses and Abuses of Social Sciences: Disciplines of and for What?” Entitled “Are We Ready Yet for Action Anthropology?”, my paper is intended to counter arguments that anthropologists’ refusal to cooperate with military and intelligence efforts like HTS, PRISP, and the Minerva Consortium necessarily condemns anthropology to irrelevance. My hope is that by examining the model of action anthropology, which has gained little traction in academic anthropology in the 50 years since Sol Tax and his students proposed it, a way of meaningfully engaging contemporary issues might emerge that avoids the troubling issues raised by direct subordination to military and intelligence agencies.

Other participants include David Price, Catherine Lutz, Hugh Gusterson, Jeff Bennett, Robert Vitalis, Matthew Sparke, Sean Mitchell, Kevin Caffrey, Amahl Bishara, Rochelle Davis, Roberto Gonzalez, Keith Brown, Chris Nelson, and a variety of U of Chicago folks from anthropology and the other social sciences, including honorary Savage Mindster Marshall Sahlins. (Note: I’m listed as “editor” of Savage Minds, a title I neither asked for nor knew was being ascribed to me! I’m also listed as an “independent researcher”, despite my 6 years affiliation with the College of Southern Nevada…)

On a related note, the paper I presented last year will be out early 2010 from University of Chicago Press in a collected volume of essays from the conference. (Can we talk some time about academic publishers demanding all copyrights? For free?) As far as I know, the book will be titled following the conference, that is Anthropology and Counterinsurgency. Look for it in an academic bookstore near you!

When I was in graduate school at MIT, I remember hearing a talk about a project to digitize newspapers, shortly before this became a widespread reality. An important part of this demo, or talk, or whatever it was, was the claim that what digital newspapers would allow would be the customization of news–an early intimation of the RSS feed–allowing individuals to tailor the kind of news that made up their newspaper so that they could ignore all that other arbitrary stuff cluttering up their world and focus only on the things they really cared about. I also remember that
people in the room were genuinely troubled by this; the argument went something like… maybe it is a good thing that people are confronted with news they don’t necessarily want to see, news that is important but that might be excluded by an algorithm whose purpose is to weed out anything unfamiliar.

I remember being unconvinced by these anxieties, but also unable to put my finger on why, exactly, they seemed so unconvincing. Reading Anderson this time round triggered this memory because of his focus on how newspapers, as part of print-capitalism, contribute to the imagined community that is a nation. What makes newspapers central to nationalism is twofold: first, the arbitrary juxtaposition of stories (famine in Mali one day, sports in the US the next, an inauguration the third) creates the imagination of a community united in “homogenous empty time” such that “if Mali disappears from the pages of the New York Times after two days of famine reportage, this does not mean that Mali has disappeared or that famine has wiped out all its citizens. The novelistic format of the newspaper assures them that somewhere out there the ‘character’ Mali moves along quietly, awaiting its next reappearance in the plot”(33). Second, the production of newspapers as a reliable commodity whose form is familiar (“one-day bestsellers” he calls them) means that large numbers of people “imagine” the same world, and expect others to be imagining it with them.

What makes the digitization of news significant then, and the advent of personalized news feeds and RSS readers troubling, is that it is now possible to imagine that my version of the New York Times is not the same as your version. Or more generally, that my sources for news are giving me an entirely different picture of the same phenomena or events or issues than yours. As such what is troubling is not that I fail to be confronted with things I don’t necessarily want to see (as the critiques of personalized news suggested), but that we can no longer imagine ourselves to all (“all” in the sense of a national public) be reading (or not reading) the same newspaper. Instead, we have introduced the possibility for a very large number of partially overlapping imagined communities. Pluralism? Perhaps. Certainly a successor to the mass consciousness of high-nationalism in the late 19th, early 20th century.

***

A similar issue was raised for me concerning Anderson’s analysis of language and its role in the constitution of modern nationalism. Capitalism and print created “monoglot mass reading publics.” The “fatality” (a confusing term, I think) of linguistic diversity seems to suggest that Anderson thinks these monoglot publics centralized around sovereign states; which is to say, the familiar story of the rise of official languages (High German, the Academie Francaise) is intimately tied to the power of these nationalist imaginary communities. This fact is buttressed by a strange footnote (no. 19 in Chapter 3): “We still have no giant multinationals in the world of publishing.” The point of which seems to be that monoglot reading publics are so important to national power that a multinational *publishing* corporation is an impossibility, unlike, say a multinational *oil* company.

Remember that this is published in 1983; the claim seems a strange one, since corporations like Springer, Elsevier and others clearly have been multinationals for at least as long as they have been publishing, simply setting up shop in many nations and working in many languages. But it also seems odd given Anderson’s careful attention to “Creole Pioneers” as part of the foundation of nationalism. What is strange is Anderson’s seeming failure to recognize English as a global creole. Multinational publishers are, perhaps, the harbingers and laboratories of post-nationalism, giving form to Englishes and Spanishes whose power is not tied to any particular sovereign entity… not even a colonial one in the terms of Anderson’s theory. Perhaps I’m a poor reader of Anderson, or perhaps this is all old news, but it’s made me wonder if there isn’t a way to get at post-nationalism… which is to say, new forms of imagined communities (and I naturally care about such things *cough* recursive publics *cough*) that are not nationalisms of the 19th century variety.

***

One last thing I found fascinating on re-reading Anderson, was his use of the term “piracy” to describe how the “model” of independent national states (typified by France and America) was ported around the globe. Naturally the language of piracy, remixing, re-using or porting has renewed salience today. Anderson’s concern with the “modulation” of practices that make up nationalism is one that I think could bear further abstraction and specification. Even if nations and nationalism are no longer a goal, the creation of imagined communities through practices that give form to shared time (a periodicity of interaction) and meaning to shared stories and narratives is something that continues, and continues to create forms for adoption and modification. All this on the day that a new president is inaugurated who speaks a pragmatic idiom of nationalism that is both a call for a change and an appeal to ‘timeless’ truths.

So, what to make of Blair’s course? The topics are interesting and are exactly those topics which concern many anthropologists: faith, globalization, identity, etc. (Blair recently “came out” as a Catholic.) Unfortunately, I can’t imagine any student staying awake in this class. Neither Volf nor Blair seems to have much to say about these topics except for vague platitudes. I thought that watching this would give me an opportunity to say something interesting and/or critical about Blair’s take on these topics from an anthropological point of view – but I honestly didn’t hear anything worth commenting on. He sees globalization as a force which “opens up” society and religious faith as capable of either aiding or hindering that opening up … depending (not quite sure on what).

I almost deleted this post, but then I thought it might be worth posting it to see if anyone has anything more insightful to say about it than I do. And who knows, maybe the course will get more interesting later on…

The first is the story of the “Stone Age Tasaday“:

Who are the Tasaday? Depending on whom you ask, you’ll hear very different answers to this question. You’ll either hear that they’re a group of leaf-wearing, stone-age-tool-using cave dwellers who, when they were discovered in 1971 living in a rain forest on the Philippine island of Mindanao, believed they were the only people in the world. Or you’ll hear that they’re a complete fraud… poor farmers who were cynically coerced into posing as a stone-age tribe by powerful politicians. What’s the truth? To that there is no simple answer.

The second is a 10 minute contribution by Werner Herzog to a 2002 film. Herzog’s segment is called “10,000 years older” and can be found on YouTube in three parts (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).

There is also a short film on the Survival International website.

We’ve also had a number of “first contact” related posts on Savage Minds:

• More for ‘First Contact’ Junkies
• Breaking News: Intrepid Explorer’s First Contact with a Vanishing Race of Noble Savages
• By Aeroplane to Pygmyland
• Syllabi-o-rama! (Direct link to Rex’s First Contact syllabus.)

I’ll update this post with additional links as I find them.

For me, Appadurai is like Mahler — I recognize the genius, I understand why it appeals to some, but at the end of the day all it does is make me queasy (I should say that I am talking about his writing — Appadurai is a very nice guy in person). I began to ask myself: why does this article appeal? Or, more specifically, why did it appeal in the context of the late-80s early-90s?

Having read chronologically in anthropological theory I was struck by a couple of trends that seem to all come together in Appadurai’s essay in a way that made it exemplary of a diffuse but widely spread mood in the anthropology of the period.
1. skepticism, and more generally a lack of sympathy for approaches which aspired to, knowledge modeled on labeled science — an awareness of the power dynamics of research and publishing, the rhetorical nature of all writing, and the difficulty of creating ‘objective’ knowledge.

2. Simultaneous to this _reduction_ in (or problematization of) the scope of anthropology’s ethnographic ambition, an enormous _expansion_ of its ambition. At a moment when writing an ethnography of a ‘village’ becomes epistemologically, rhetorically, and politically suspect, anthropology decided that no less than the entire planet needed to be scrutinized.

3. Recognition that evocative writing is a serious rival to presenting ‘facts’, since ‘facts’ are in any case a paricularly kind of evocative writing.

4. “The triumph of Stanley Diamond over Eric Wolf”: the political economic flavor of Marxist anthropology is edged out by its humanist competitor as discussion shifts towards Those Wacky Commodities Are Just Everywhere. Something about the uptake of Benjamin here.

An unfair, very quick take on _Disjuncture and Difference_ is that it was so popular because it managed to suggest a way to study global scopes in a politico-epistemologically acceptable way. The result is rich, suggesive prove whose promise has not, as far as I know, really been fulfilled.

For me, Savage Minds has always been a place to “mess around”, anthropologically speaking. A place to try out new ideas and thin hypotheses, a wall to throw stuff onto in order to see what sticks. A place where I could try my hand at the kind of argument Yehudi Cohen makes in Disappearance of the Incest Taboo (that’s an AnthroSource link, for those with access) and string together some ideas about the end of marriage, or muse about the moral underpinnings of anthropology. A place to incubate arguments and positions — and to receive feedback from my peers both inside and outside of the field.

It’s been invaluable to have this kind of forum, away from the main channel of academic thought — the journals and academic presses that are our disciplinary mainstream, even if many of them have lower readerships than Savage Minds. So valuable, in fact, that I felt it absolutely necessary to include Savage Minds in my “Acknowledgements” when I published Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War. Here’s what I wrote:

Over the years, two online communities have proven invaluable as both a source of new ideas and a place to rehearse my own fevered anthropological imaginings. To the members of ANTHRO-L (especially Ron Kephart, John McCreery, Richard Senghas, Jacob Lee, Richard Wilsnack, Anj Petto, Ray Scupin, Robert Lawless, Wade Tarzia, Lynn Manners, Martin Cohen, Bruce Josephson, Richley Crapo, Tom Kavanagh, Scott MacEachern, Mike Pavlik, Thomas Riley, and Phil Young) and my fellow Savage Minds, (Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Chris Kelty, Nancy LeClerc, Kathleen Lowery, Tak Watanabe, and newbies Thomas Erikson, Maia Green, and Thomas Strong) I offer both my gratitude and respect.

In the end, I’m not sure I could have written Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War without having had this forum to develop those ideas. The other Minds and the many people who comment here not only helped me to refine my thoughts on anthropology and its role(s) in society, but to rethink myself as an anthropologist.

By way of gratitude, then, I asked my publishers if I could offer at least a little something back to this community which has offered me so much. They responded enthusiastically, providing me with a discount code to offer Savage Minds readers. So here’s the deal:

1. Order Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War from U Mich Press.
2. At checkout, enter the coupon code: WAX08UMP
3. Enjoy a 20% savings!

With the coupon code, the US price is $26.00 instead of the usual $32.50. As far as I know, this offer is not limited to US buyers, but I’m pretty sure the price of international shipping will eat up any savings over buying the book at full price locally. The coupon code expires on May 30, 2008.

For more information about the book, check out the review by Penny Howard at the Socialist Review. More reviews and information about the book will be posted at my personal site on the book page as it becomes available.

And if you’re not interested, for whatever reason (maybe your mother was cruel to you as a child?), that’s cool, too — I offer you as a member of the Savage Minds community my thanks.

But really, buy the book. Buy the book or I shall plug at you a second time! Tphptptptptp!