It’s a great piece which puts empathy, not ‘cultural relativism’ (whatever that is) at the center of our endeavors. My favorite part of the piece is central section where Lowie suggests that even Nazis are deserving of empathy. It’s an extraordinary statement, especially coming from a German Jew. I don’t want to automatically assume that everything Lowie said is right because he is old and important — there is a lot unattractive about Lowie — but this idea that anthropologists should be able to see things even from a Nazi’s point of view has always struck with me.

This impulse for empathy sits uneasily with anthropology’s other moral intuition: activist denunciation of power in the name of a leftist populism. Frankly, a lot of work done in this vein is carried out in an emotional tone that is very far from empathy indeed.

I think this is one of the reasons why I personally have never had much use for an activist framing for my own work. This often surprises people, since I work on such a sexily political topic: huge mining company crushes indigenous people. But in fact most of my work is about how this simple framing doesn’t capture the facts on the ground, even if it does tell a simple story of the sort we like to hear.

For me, a commitment to social justice is part and parcel of empathy. As in: if you have the later you think people deserve the former. I study all aspects of mining, from the boardroom to the ball mill to the communities living sandwiched between waste dumps. And to be honest, I have empathy with everyone in all parts of that chain. This doesn’t mean that I agree with them, but I feel that if Lowie can be empathetic of a Nazi, surely I can put myself in the shoes of a mining executive.

I teach courses in political anthropology that are focused around particular topics such as the 2008 Financial Crisis and Great Environmental Disasters Of The Global Oil Industry. Reading these topics with my class has taught me that students don’t need to be cultivate a critical attitude. Reality, as they say, has a well-known liberal bias. All you have to do to be outraged is possess some baseline socialization into American culture. My experience in these courses is that empathy, rather than denunciation, leads to moral certainty. There is no better way to be sure that your moral intuitions are correct than to really, really try to see it from the point of view of someone else. When you do this and still think they are a total asshole, then you can have faith that your moral intuitions are correct.

It’s for this reason that I’ve always preferred empathy to anger-driven activism — not because the first is apolitical, but because the second is a shortcut to a judgment that is too important to be rushed. Even a Nazi deserves empathy — even if in the end we do not agree with them.

In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility by Dinah Rajak: How has this book not been getting more play? An ethnography of Anglo American (!) a prominent mining company, which starts in London boardrooms and ends in the mine itself. What I’ve read so far is well-written, intelligent, and very ethnographic. A great account of how morality and the market interpenetrate in new ways under CSR which manages to show, rather than tell, the sinister side of this phenomenon in a balanced way.

Going Abroad: Traveling Like An Anthropologist by Robert Gordon: That’s right, a travel book by an anthropologist. Bob Gordon is a superb ethnographer with decades (and decades and decades) of experience working in highly politicized situations (think: Namibia) and who has developed exquisitely tuned bullshit detectors as a result. He is also like a superathlete who can climb over mountains just by looking at them. So when he tells you what sort of shoes to pack or how to ask who is benefiting from the political economy of your touristic encounter, you should probably listen. Great for tourists, and I’d even give this one to graduate students heading into the field.

Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics by Graham Harman: When this first passed my radar I thought ‘good lord a secondary source on Latour?’ and then I felt a little queasy. But in fact when I started reading this book I found it to be absolutely marvelous. It’s clearly written in some thing like Latour’s style, and does a superb job of covering Latour’s work from Pasteurization of France to Pandora’s Hope (i.e. missing a lot of the more recent stuff), although to be honest it’s not like these books are hard to read. In particular Harman ties Latour to broader philosophical conversations, which is really helpful, although some readers might not be interested in how Latour takes issue with Aristotle’s theory of substance. More useful is the way this orients the reader to the hopping philosophical circles that Harman moves in, and for the biographical and characterological notes on Latour himself. It really, as they used to say in the eighties, ‘lifts the kimono’ on a lot of this stuff. Plus best of all it is available free for download as an open access PDF. Let he who has ears hear.

Uh… I think that’s it for now. What do you all have on your reading lists for the next couple of weeks?

The title of this post comes from a 1930 article in Man which discusses the superiority of such tops over various other ways to measure skin color, such as Broca’s skin color charts. While I knew anthropologists had used Broca’s charts, I don’t recall reading about the use of color tops, which was apparently quite common. The tops used were actually by Milton Bradley, but as best I can tell they were quite similar to the Bauhaus design pictured above. [Can anyone find a picture of the actual Milton Bradely tops?]

The colour top is a device made by the Milton Bradley Company, of Spring- field, Mass., U.S.A., a firm which manufactures kindergarten supplies. It is, primarily intended for teaching children the principles of colour blending. The first investigator to use it for recording skin-colour was Davenport, who employed it in his study of the heredity of skin-colour in Negro-White crosses in Jamaica (1913). The principle is one with which we were all familiar in our childhood. The apparatus consists of a small top, of the disc variety, spun by means of a wooden spindle kept in place by a nut. On this basal disc, which is of cardboard, are placed paper discs of various colours. When the top is spun the colours blend… The proportion of each colour which goes to the make-up of this composite surface can be varied at will, by merely moving the discs round upon the spindle… By suitable adjustment of these four discs, the spinning surface can be made to reproduce,with a considerable degree of exactitude, the colour of human skin of all shades and gradations that may be met with.

Be warned, however,

The judgment must always be made while the top is rotating at full speed. Even slight slackening of speed renders matching difficult and the records unreliable.

I learned of the use of these tops from an interview with Michael Keevak, author of Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking. It sounds like another interesting book from the man who wrote The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax, which I blogged about back in 2006.

Did you get that? A list of the books that members of a top-tier journal’s editorial board are reading? This is the sort of inside scoop that I think a lot of people will be interested in: content filtered by a source whose taste you (presumably) value. Cultural Anthropology is not alone in doing this — my alma maters are increasingly sending me “give us money, here is what your old professors are reading” junk mail, so perhaps this is a growing trend.

Most of what I’ve learned from this list is that I am just fine not reading what Michael Hardt reads. But one thing did stand out for me: more than one person is reading François Dosse’s new biography of Deleuze and Guattari. When you get more than one person reading something, and that something is on the Theorist(s) Of The Moment, and those theorists write insane, incomprehensible prose (“the black hole acts as a central computer, Christ, the third eye that moves across the wall or the white screen serving as a general surface of reference”) you start looking pretty seriously at the secondary sources the big shots are reading.

Especially when it’s from François Dosse. Dosse does a variety of popular intellectual history that is distinctly Parisian: it is the sort of thing that you might find on the front table of book stores on the Left Bank, based on extensive research and yet written as if intellectual history belonged in a gossip column. I haven’t read this newest book, but in his past work Dosse’s prose has been extremely — even excessively — racy. It makes them accessible and great fun to read, but also and very difficult to translate.

Dosse specializes in movements and schools — one of his early works was on the Annales school and quite good, but the translator took his long subordinate clauses and adjectival phrases (which are elegant in French) and turned them into an English that is just soupy. His more well-known two-volume History of Structuralism received much better treatment and is a lot of fun to read and quite informative, especially for sketches of intellectual figures who once were taken seriously.

It looks like Glassman, who translated the structuralism book, did the Deleuze and Guattari one as well, which is a good sign. I am not sure how many people want to plop down thirty five bucks on a six hundred and fifty page book but if this thing is your idea of reading for spring break then this should keep you busy while we wait to hear about what is actually on Aihwa Ong’s iPod.

Since I haven’t yet read any of the linked works, I won’t comment on what the list tells us about the state of our discipline, but I imagine a thorough investigation of the listed works might be able to tell us something – especially if we were able to compare it with a similar list from a decade ago. I did notice that about half of the listed ethnographies are available on Amazon Kindle for about $15 which encourages me to think that I might actually read some of them!

Without further ado, here is the list.

Breaking Ranks recounts, largely through interview excerpts, the stories of six Iraq War veterans who became involved with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and other military anti-war organizations and participated in the larger GI Rights Oral History Project. It takes us from their decisions to join the military, through combat, anti-war epiphanies, homecomings, and involvement in anti-war activism.

The patchwork composition of the book reflects the veterans’ attempts to piece together a narrative of their lives defined by the watershed of their experiences in Iraq. While book’s overall structure parses these experiences into a general arc of life—from enlistment, to the shock and fog of war, to political awakening, to struggles with trauma, to activism—it doesn’t smooth over the rough edges of these experiences or impose too clear an order on the muddle of reflexive memories that the soldiers offer.

As the authors note in the introduction, the book is an account of how these six people (five men and one woman; three soldiers, one sailor, one Marine, and one National Guardsman) found their way to a public, anti-war position and of “the striking and original ideas each developed to understand the war and what it meant. Their critiques are not simple matches to those of the civilian antiwar movement or to our own as authors” (8). Thus Breaking Ranks suggest that while it is possible to speak of a single anti-war movement, that singularity subsumes a multiplicity of different meanings and the ones we hear here are not always foregrounded.

Gutmann and Lutz’ Zinn-ian project of documenting the grassroots critiques so often written out of American History is well complemented by their anthropological attention to the little details of daily life (in the military, at war, and after) that aggregate into feelings of frustration and individual acts of political resistance, suggesting the complex and divergent paths through which soldiers come to, as they say, “speak out”.

Thought the text of the book is devoted to six stories, it is also peppered with facts and events that position these very diverse lives within a single post 9/11 historical moment which is also linked, by both the authors and the subjects, to the American legacies of the Vietnam War and its contemporary anti-war motifs.

In their curation of the stories, Gutmann and Lutz also demonstrate the ways that war insinuates itself into civilian life in America, making military service seem like the best possible option for many Americans whose lives are made hard or unstable by the exigencies of family expectations, national pride, poverty, and youth. The Introduction and endnotes are also full of data and resources for further reading about the ‘dark side’ (as Alex Gibney might say) of America’s war in Iraq.

Lately, ‘the good war’ in Afghanistan is consuming more and more of America’s attention and resources and, in the months since Breaking Ranks was released this summer, American combat operations in Iraq have been declared over (again) and the ‘draw-down’ of combat troops and ‘civilian surge’ there have begun. In this context, we can read in Breaking Ranks deeper questions about the different justifications for American military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq at the level of individual experience and public discourse alike, as well as about the fundamental nature of wars in which nation-states confront non-state entities through the sanctioned, violent acts of their citizens. As our attention, and perhaps attitudes, to America’s two main post-9/11 military operations seems to be shifting, Braking Ranks can help readers think about how things have (and haven’t) changed in military life and policy at home and down range.

In addition to being a powerful documentary record and conversation starter about the Iraq War, Breaking Ranks strikes me as an important, accessible, and eminently teachable book that speaks of the conflicted experiences of soldiers in war, the political failings of America’s doctrine of pre-emptive war, and the contingent evolution of personal conflict into political action. It would be well suited to undergraduate classes on war, trauma, social movements, public or activist anthropology, and—given its format—methods courses that discuss life-story interviews and practices of ethnographic writing.

[A bit of full disclosure: Royalties from Breaking Ranks are being donated to IVAW; an organization with which I did some fieldwork in 2008 and which I've personally supported]

I’ve always been struck by the duality I see in how archaeologists approach knapping. On the one hand, they produce articles like the one in the Journal of Archaeological Science, full of exhaustive and incredibly sophisticated methods to study the acquisition of knapping skills from the outside in. On the other hand, they round up a bunch of 20 year olds, give them some gloves (hopefully!) and make them knapp till they bleed — which often doesn’t take very long. This is knapping form the inside out, the skill passed down from one archaeologist to the other via bruised, calloused fingers.

Although there is a lot of variation within anthropology, I would have to say that one of the most distinctive things about our discipline is our commitment to learning about humanity from the inside out. It is surely one of the most unique things about our discipline that we are committed to the idea that being human with other humans is a far more sophisticated way of learning about them than any other sort of method that works from the outside in. Some methods distrust our intuitions and sympathies as biases distortions, but we feel that we are by ourselves infinitely more complex instruments for gathering data than the artifacts we make.

Of course, this commitment to learning from the inside out has its drawbacks. There is such a thing as bias, and there is a lot of value to be gained by using formal methods or advanced instrumentation — remember, I began this blog entry saying that I found the Journal of Archaeological Science worth reading! But on the whole we feel like if we can learn to make the arrowheads and hafted axes of social life, then we have something that counts as knowledge that we can pass on to others, and we can skip the meticulously recorded and coded video records of people knocking bits off the edge of a stone blank.

Admittedly, this means we often get little respect from people with much more myopic definitions of knowledge, but I think this demonstrates the limits of their vision, not ours. Like stone tools, there is nothing primitive about our discipline. Or, perhaps, there’s something primitive about it that’s worth holding on to.

…

“It’s words and pictures and you can do anything you want with words and pictures.” -Harvey Pekar

American Splendor is not a typical comic book. Over the course of almost 40 years it aspired only to chronicle the life of its author, Harvey Pekar, a file clerk in a Cleveland VA hospital. In small detail with intimate vignettes, anecdotes, and observations Pekar renders stories that have very little action, some are comprised almost entirely of talking or an internal monologue. Originally published and distributed independently by the author before success delivered him to major publishers late in life, American Splendor was one of the first true underground comics and it nurtured a devout cult following that in 2003 culminated in a major motion picture by the same name starring Paul Giamatti. Harvey Pekar died this past Monday, July 12, at the age of 70.

Coinciding with the movie release, Ballantine Books released an anthology of Pekar’s stories that serves as fine introduction to his work of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I would make the case that American Splendor realizes the greatest potential of postmodern navel-gazing autoethnography.

Here’s Paul Giamatti as Pekar.

I feel an affection for American Splendor because at times I write this way too, but mostly I don’t care to read what other anthropologists have written in this mode, the exception being Robert Leonard’s peerless, Yellow Cab. But American Splendor is compulsively readable and rereadable. In fact it might find a more appreciative audience in non-comic book fans.

More than anything American Splendor is marked by its depiction of mundane subject matter. In perhaps my favorite short of the book Pekar wakes up next to his girlfriend. He brushes his teeth and eats breakfast. He walks to the grocery store to do some shopping and on the way home runs into a friend. They talk and then he’s on his way. He sees the mailman and collects a package. He comes home and talks to his girlfriend, obsessing over his lackluster efforts to establish himself as a published jazz critic. When she discovers he forgot to buy coffee they have a fight and he leaves to buy the coffee.

That’s it. The end. Once upon a time there was this guy and some things happened. Here they are.

American Splendor is a record of a life lived. Arguably it embodies many of the same qualities that the late novelist and poet Roberto Bolano called “infrarealism,” a term the Guardian, in its obituary of Bolano, pigeonholed through his novel The Savage Detectives, “a challenging mixture of thriller, philosophical and literary reflections, pastiche and autobiography.” This definition works well for American Splendor too, save the bit about being a thriller. Unless you’re riveted by the spectacle of talking on the phone, taking a bath, just lying in bed, talking about sports, checking the mailbox, or walking around the streets of Cleveland thinking.

In some of these stories we are like guests in Pekar’s head. For example one is nothing more than him taking a walk, coming home and reading, then writing, then reading some more and talking to himself. This aspect of his existence is not unlike mine, living a life of the mind and looking to the printed word for comfort and wisdom. Pekar writes a lot about writing. We follow his trials as he fights to publish and distribute his comic book independently, takes promising phone calls that lead nowhere, sees his career as a jazz critic and political essayist stall, gets jerked around by the Village Voice, and meets celebrities. Anyone struggling to get published and establish themselves in the field will find something familiar here.

At most Pekar’s plots do not advance beyond swiping his neighbor’s newspaper, shooting the shit with co-workers on break, helping friends move, and serving jury duty. Like anthropologies that claim a history of the present American Splendor preserves for future generations what it was like to be lonely man working a dead-end job in a mid-western city in the late twentieth century. Even Pekar’s meager diet of rice, Corn Flakes, peanut butter, and Pepsi manages to make its way to illustration.

While most of American Splendor is taken up with Pekar telling the story of himself, he occasionally veers into oral history to tell other people’s stories. Pekar is an American Jew and he seeks out the company of older, European immigrant Jews. Borrowing their voices he regales us with tales of unionized workers getting beat on the picket line, Jewish street hustlers, and concentration camp survivors. Pekar also relates to his Black co-workers and finds it important to tell us about their musical tastes, folk wisdom, and opinions on pickled okra.

It must be said that a great deal of what makes the series so strong is the way that Pekar’s introspection is reflected creatively by his artists. One vignette features a full page spread of Pekar walking on top of another image of him just standing around, below his feet are studies of his profile, all layered on top of an oversized image of his forehead, eyes looking down. Lettering fills every available space as he thinks to himself and reflects. The reader’s eyes are drawn down the page in this cascade, but there is no action. Cleveland is a star in these stories as well. The reader is treated to realistic illustration that mirrors Pekar’s own realism through detailed renderings of industrial buildings, trains, streets, storefronts, and cars. Traffic lights, wires, and poles. Even the cracks in sidewalks.

For anthropologies that seeks to tell it like it is, to represent people’s lives in a way that they can recognize, American Splendor stands as a subtly complicated role model.

…

What follows are some of Harvey Pekar’s infamous David Letterman appearances (you may need headphones to hear these, folks have ripped these from their VHS collections and the audio can be weak):

]]> http://savageminds.org/2010/07/14/illustrated-man-1-american-splendor/feed/ 14 http://savageminds.org/2010/04/06/two-books-on-indigenous-methods/ http://savageminds.org/2010/04/06/two-books-on-indigenous-methods/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:30:07 +0000 Rex http://savageminds.org/?p=3414 I am a late adopter of Twitter (r3x0r — feel free to follow me), and one of the nice things about being late to the party is that all of your old friends have already arrived and had a few drinks by the time you find a place to park. I’ve been trading tweets lately with Tad McIlwraith about some books on methods — particularly books on anthropological-y methods by indigenous scholars and activists who have better things to do than be anthropologists.

For many years the gold standard for those of us living and working in the Pacific has been Linda Tuhawai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies. Smith’s book has been trailblazing, but it is also in many ways a first step — like Lassiter’s volume on collaborative anthropology, a lot of the book is taken up not so much with a discussion of methods per se as groundclearing: building a genealogy for your study (Lassiter) or thinking through what it means to decolonize one’s self (Smith) (although more recently she has hooked up with the Denzin/Lincoln crowd to produce a Handbook on Critical and Indigenous Methodologies I’d like to read if ever appears at a non-ridiculous price).

In comparison, Research Is Ceremony seems focused on how, concretely, one could do ethnographic research with a distinctive indigenous twist. At times, this sort of thing can become too New Agey for my taste, but as far as I can tell (having not read the whole thing yet) Wilson does a good job of wearing his heart on his sleeve and providing good insights on how to do research.

The other volume — which Tad is promoting heavily — is Living Proof: The Essential Data Collection Guide for Use-And-Occupancy Map Surveys. This volume, published by the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, basically outlines a method for people map their land and make their claims to it ‘legible’ on their own terms. Again, I haven’t had a chance to look at it, but it looks really interesting and useful.

Even though most anthropologists are not indigenous, I think it is really important that we keep up date with work being done on indigenous methods for several reasons: to make sure our discipline is a place indigenous people want to come study, to make sure we understand what is going on with other people who are committed to ethnographic and qualitative methods, and finally (of course) to learn something new. It would be great if in the future anthropologists working in indigenous communities (or pretty much anywhere) could learn to use and spread these methods, not as yet another case of appropriating indigenous culture for our own ends, but as a way of learning from people who are our equals and perhaps even, methodologically, our superiors.

Getting It Published by William Germano

Germano’s book does not actually have a series of easy-to-follow steps that will lead to being instantly published, but it does help give you context for what decisions are made in publishing and how they are made. It’s a valuable reality check for someone looking to publish. Like I say I’ve read it and found it really helpful.

There are a few other books that the editor didn’t mention but which I’ve also gotten some mileage out of that may be off the academic radar that I thought I’d mention as well. The first is

Making The Perfect Pitch: How To Catch A Literary Agent’s Eye, by Katharine Sands

Of the bintillion ‘how to get your first novel published’ books out there this is the one that I think is actually worthwhile. It’s quite ethnographic, actually — it contains numerous five-to-ten page reminiscences by authors and agents about how to write one-page pitch letters to attract a literary agent. It’s a frank, engaging book that features people finally laying down on the page all the complaining and advising they’ve been doing for years. There is no real overview or formula or big idea — just a chance to see some good (and bad!) examples and to climb into these people’s habituses. Habitoi? Habtiusi? Even though we academics don’t do agent-based publishing its still a great read.

Finally, in distant third is:

Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath

I have to admit that I am not a big fan of “books Lifehacker is breathlessly enthusiastic for this week”, and particularly not books like this which stray into social science territory. In this book the Heaths attempt to boil down into a simply formula the six things that supposedly are memorable ideas have. To a lot of people it will seem like a fluffy mix of cognitive psychology and folklore studies that could have been ten pages long. Bu I have to admit that ever since I’ve read this book I find myself unwillingly recognizing the utility of their framework. I’ll be explaining how ‘theoretical contribution’ is measured by the NSF and find myself saying “it’s like the ‘unexpectedness’ criteria from Made to Stick” or be talking about a dissertation proposal and say “it’s really got ‘story’”. So maybe there is something to it after all. At any rate if you just go to the book’s website you can check out the six principles and if you give them your email address you can download a bunch of stuff and just skip the book entirely. So a guarded thumbs up for this one as well.

I know there are other books on publishing out there — I think ‘the art of abstracting’ is a strange a lovely hommage to the work of being a full-time absracter, for instance — and would be interested in hearing other people’s recommendations.

The main purpose of Abbott’s paper is to describe how library-based research actually works. While standard social scientific work is sequential (you plan, gather data, then analyze it), he claims that library work is a massively parallel — as you read and pull things from the shelves you are planning, gathering, and analyzing all at once. Its a strikingly true portrayal of how library work works, and how important browsing and chance encounters are for library work.

Since most of the insights of library work come out of the incredibly complex and serendipitous processes that occur when a mind meets a library, Abbott claims that the only way to make library work better is to increase the value and capability of the mind that is engaged in it. Or, as I sometimes say, there is a lot of be said for reading eight hours a day. No matter how many fancy tagging programs you run or PDFs you download, if a tremendous amount of resources haven’t been put into the human using them, then it is all for naught.

Even worse, Abbott points out that the torrent of new information available on the Internet floods us with low-quality work (and ‘juvenalia’ he notes disparagingly), and makes it easier to find citations we want, when in fact what we need is a system — like a library shelf — which gives us things that we don’t know we needed until we ran into them. I think he may underestimate the serendipity of good web browsing, but his argument does speak actively to a topic that has rolled up on Savage Minds before: given that we can now browse forever, how do we balance different speeds of research? Now that we can browse an endless sea of information endlessly should we? And how much value is there in just sitting down with a book for a day, week, or month? Abbot comes down firmly on the side of good old fashioned deep engagement with a small number of quality texts.

Abbott’s work often has a contrarian, and perhaps even crotchety, streak. But I have to admit that two months in Papua New Guinea with limited Internet connection has reminded me of the value of not-browsing and just-reading. It was a pleasure to sit down with reports from PNG’s National Research Institute and actually read works that would otherwise get Zotero’d into oblivion in my everyday browsing. Its a piece worth reading, and I’d be interested in seeing what you think about it.

Dr. Harper says that in early June, the University of Tennessee’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) revoked her standing research clearance on the grounds that the police and FBI investigations and the seizure of her research materials exposed her informants to risks. She was told that she “could not use my data until I had assurance from the FBI and university that I was no longer under surveillance.” As these investigations continued, however, they found nothing to indicate that she had made threats or was somehow building a hydrogen bomb. Yet, Dr. Harper was caught in a classic double-bind. Although the FBI did not find that she had done anything wrong, she could not complete her work simply because this investigation had opened her private research records up to FBI scrutiny. This, of course, seriously imperiled her professional activity and development. Last fall, Dr. Harper learned that the faculty in her department voted to deny her tenure application.

There is a petition on her behalf.

(Thanks to the many, many, people who sent this our way. Server was acting sluggish so apologies for the delay.)

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

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

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

Rather than dismiss informants’ accounts as imaginative ‘interpretations’ – elaborate metaphorical accounts of a reality that is already given – anthropologists might instead seize on these engagements as opportunities from which novel theoretical understandings can emerge.

The editors, in the introduction, present a methodological framework that would do the job that the they set out for the volume. They first suggest that ethnographers have to do away with a priori distinction between persons and things; even hybridity as a concept would not do, because there is already an implicit ‘presumption of an initial separation.’ Instead, they want to ethnographers to ‘take “things” encountered in the field as they present themselves, rather than immediately assuming that they signify, represent, or stand for something else’.

They have Bruno Latour, Alfred Gell, Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro and Roy Wagner as precursors. What they find most appealing in the works of these authors is the move they have been making from an epistemological anthropology towards an ontological anthropology, and they have been doing this by simply taking the perspective of their informants into account. Only that these authors, they have not taken their informants’ actions into account in order to ‘explain’ them away; they have accepted the categories – or the absence of any categories – that their informants provided, and followed them wherever they led. One central point they make, following from an urge to move from epistemological to ontological studies, is that epistemology provides what they term worldviews – different ways of ‘knowing’ the world, different ‘cultural perspectives’ or ‘beliefs’. They would want studies that are about ‘worlds’  and not ‘worldviews’. The statement on the way this is achieved is long, but I think it deserves to be quoted in full.

We start with the ordinary (representationist/epistemological) assumption that concepts are the site of difference. Then we argue that in order for difference to be taken seriously (as ‘alterity’), the assumption that concepts are ontologically distinct from the things to which they are ordinarily said to ‘refer’ must be discarded. From this follows that alterity can quite properly be thought of as a property of things – things, that is, which are concepts as much as they appear to us as ‘material’ or ‘physical’ entities. Hence the first answer to the incredulous question of where ‘different worlds’ might be, is here, in front of us, in the things themselves (things like powder or – as we’ll see in the contributions to this book – photographs, legal documents, shamanic costumes, cigarettes, and so on). So this is a method of ‘back to the things themselves’ as the phenomenologists had it, but only with the caveat that this is not because the ‘life-world’ of our experience of things has priority over a ‘theoretical attitude’ […] but precisely because our experience of things, if you will, can be conceptual (p 13).

A review of the book by Daniel Miller is available here.

an ILL/ELLip(op)tical po – ETIC/EMIC/Lemic/litic post® uv ed DUCAT ion recherché repres©entation.

Yes, you heard me right:

“an ILL/ELLip(op)tical po – ETIC/EMIC/Lemic/litic post® uv ed DUCAT ion recherché repres©entation.”:http://qix.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/5/706

I was going to write an article about how this was the worst conceivable postmodern article title until I googled that author (the very unpostmodernly named ‘Phil Smith’) and discovered that he is also the author of:

Split——ting the ROCK of {speci [ES]al} e.ducat.ion: FLOWers of lang[ue]age
in >DIS

and

MAN.i.f.e.s.t.o.: A Poetics of D(EVIL)op(MENTAL) Dis(ABILITY)

It is at this point that I would throw in the usual disclaimers that I don’t think the author is a bad guy, or that the papers are poorly written or stupid but I can’t really do that since in fact I have absolutely no idea what they are about and I’ve never met him. And I can’t really paste a quote into this blog entry because HTML is too frail a vehicle for the massive typological complexities of his prose (or perhaps I’m just too frail of a coder. That said, I have to give him credit for going balls to the walls in terms of effort, even if his claim that “WORDS ≠WORLD, ‘kay? It’s all right there in the damn books, go read ‘em yer own se’f (Gadamer, 1988)” gets exactly wrong Gadamer’s argument about the way in which language functions as the horizon of a (her)meneutic pheno(men)ology.