Let’s say I’m going to give a lecture on the anthropology of money. I do this every year and I think I do a decent job of it, but I’d be a fool not to think that David Graeber, Richard Wilk, or Keith Hart couldn’t do it better. The problem is, even if I could find entire lectures by them online, I probably wouldn’t do so. I’ve never liked using class-length lectures by other scholars in my own classes, even something like Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey which I think is great. Class-length lectures from someone else’s syllabus don’t easily fit into my own syllabus unless I work the whole syllabus around those lectures. Nor do I think any of us are comfortable giving our entire class over to pre-recorded lectures. Not only is it boring for students to watch, it just feels lazy.

But imagine that Graeber recorded a five minute lecture on the economic myth of the origins of money, and Richard Wilk recorded a five minute lecture on Polanyi, and Keith Hart gave a five minute lecture on money in West Africa, etc. Each lecture could be used by teachers as the focus of class discussion, or the basis for a collaborative interrogation of those ideas. They could also be used entirely on their own for self-study by students. In any case, they would be a valuable resource for students and teachers alike.

So here’s my suggestion: someone (OAC?, HAU?, Living Anthropologically?) creates a site which allows people to post topics they’d like to see covered, has a searchable index and perhaps some kind of a rating system as well. The lectures themselves could be hosted on Archive.org under a CC license, so people could edit and remix the lectures as they see fit. All that shouldn’t be too hard – it’s just a database. The biggest problem would be getting anthropologists to actually make and submit content. Still, it might be fun to try if someone has the energy to do so. Maybe someone could even set up a room at the AAA to help record scholars who would like to participate but aren’t comfortable around a video camera… I’m just throwing this out there, I don’t have the time to follow through, but if anyone would like to get the ball rolling, feel free to use the comment thread to discuss how such a plan might actually work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So all of those billboards kept blazing past me.  They had all sorts of messages on them, from the blandly utilitarian and boring (THIS SPACE AVAILABLE) to the humorous/weird (JEAN SHORTS ARE NEVER OK*) all the way to the erotic (XXX MEGA ADULT SUPERSTORE NEXT LEFT).  There’s certainly no shortage of themes and styles.  The billboard medium has certain constraints, of course (size, font, images, and the fact that drivers are gunning their engines anywhere between 60 and 100 miles per hour and only view those masterpieces of highway art for a few wondrous seconds).  So billboard artists and advertisers have to make important decisions in order to broadcast their messages effectively and efficiently.  They can go with humor, or shock, or offer alluring information that weary road warriors just can’t resist (HUGE, SPARKLING CLEAN RESTROOMS 25 MILES).  Similar messages or information can be transmitted to viewers in radically different ways–there are numerous methods for telling drivers to pull over and buy some crap at the next exit.

This brings me to the Vonnegut factor: all things being equal, the same basic message can be presented in dramatically different ways and still drive home a point quite powerfully**.  The book Slaughterhouse Five, which critically examines issues such as humanity, war, and violence, illustrates this quite well.  While some artists or authors explore the complexities and paradoxes of war through documentaries, films, news reports, or photographs, Vonnegut addressed similar issues through a hyperbolic, sardonic, dark, and twisted little book that is ridiculous, shocking, riveting, and depressing all at once.  He communicated his messages in a manner that might reach readers in a slightly different way than, say, All Quiet on the Western Front or Born on the Fourth of July.

So what’s the point here?  Why am I rambling on about all of this?  Well, because I am often preoccupied not only with reading anthropology, but also with writing anthropology–and how particular ideas/concepts (culture, identity, value, power) can be expressed or approached in a multiplicity of ways.  When it comes to communication, style matters.  Each medium, whether a book, film, massive billboard or ethnography, can be utilized in various ways to transport anthropological ideas and lessons from here to there.  Why does this matter to me?  Because lots of people ask me–once they hear that I am a graduate student in anthropology–exactly what it is that anthropologists do these days.  What does it mean to me when people are so often dumbfounded about what my discipline is really all about?  It means, to be overtly metaphorical about this, that on the highway of life, far too many members of the general public are speeding right past our anthropological billboards (ethnographies, monographs, press releases, etc)–so we need to either look at how we’re using those “billboards”, or stop placing them in deep, isolated gulches where passersby can’t possibly see them.

Yes, these are the kinds of things that cross my mind as I head on my way from Oklahoma City to Nashville at 70 mph on an August afternoon.  If you can read this, you are at the end of my post.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that David Graeber’s recent guest post here on Savage Minds was also partially responsible for getting me thinking about anthropology, writing, and the importance of reconsidering how we use media.  If you haven’t read it, check it out.  A good discussion, indeed.

*An actual billboard spotted somewhere between Oklahoma and Arkansas (I think) yesterday.

**Certain writers who adhere to incredibly complex or even wandering grammatical structures might disagree with me on this, and argue that there really is only one way to express particular ideas/thoughts.  Well, I disagree with them, so there.

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.

Thoughts on Fieldwork From Three Research Sites

Cultural Anthropology is a social science that explores how people understand – and act in – the world. But what, exactly, is it that Cultural Anthropologists do? How do they approach their research? In this short film, three members of MIT’s Anthropology Department, Stefan Helmreich, Erica James, and Heather Paxson, talk about their current work and the process of doing fieldwork.

The first is a wonderful new—what to call it? blog? journal? blogurnal?—anthropology blog/journal “anthropologies” aimed at exploring “contemporary anthropology through essays, short articles, and opinion pieces written from diverse perspectives.” Their first issue explores the question “What is Anthropology?”

The second is the “Working Papers” series being published by the Open Anthropology Cooperative. These remind me a little of Prickly Paradigm Press, but focused more on anthropology, and free. (Prickly Paradigm should really consider publishing on Kindle’s new “Kindle Singles” program.)

Finally, something I put together myself after some discussion with Jason Baird Jackson, who told me about Open Access Tracking Project. I had been looking for a way to make Open Access anthropology publications more visible, but I realized that I didn’t want a large, uncurated, list of articles. So I came up with “Share Anthropology.” The idea is that anyone can submit a link to a blog post, discussion, or review of an Open Access anthropology publication. The emphasis being on discussion. If, for instance, someone were to blog about Chris Kelty’s book, which is available via Open Access, then that we’d link to that blog post on the Share Anthropology. This is an ongoing experiment – if you’d like to help out please let me know, or just submit some links!

ckelty’s unimportant, quickly written, barely proofread, profound thoughts on blogging (in particular with respect to anthropology), including some clear ‘do as I say, not as I do’ moments.

Why blog?

1. Blogging is so not for everyone.  The first reason to blog is to figure out whether it is for you.  And this is part of the point:  there is no cost or barrier to blogging.  Anyone can do it, and anyone who says that there is a digital divide is selling you snake oil of one kind or another.  What they usually mean is: not everyone is equal.  This is true, and sadly, blogging won’t change that.

2. Blog because you want to, and if you are lucky because people want to read what you write.  Getting people to read what you write is not hard.  Getting the right people to read what you write is very hard.  On the other hand, it’s easier to get the anthropologist in the office next to yours to read a blog post about your last article than your last article—and might force you to elegantly and concisely communicate what it’s about and why it is important.  And if you don’t have an office, all the more reason to blog about your articles!  If you don’t have any articles, definitely stop blogging now.

Why blog in anthropology?

1. Because if we don’t, no one will.  And I don’t just mean blog, I mean talk about what anthropologists do, and write things about what is great in anthropology right now. The key to making blog posts interesting to other anthropologists?  Blog about anthropology.  The old saw about writing what you know goes here.

2. Because it makes anthropology public.  The calls for a public anthropology have been coming for decades, but it’s not going to happen unless people take the risk of interacting—not just with “the public” (whoever they are), but with their peers around the country and around the world; with anthropologists who teach at community colleges, work in corporations, or left the practice for greener pastures, but never gave up loving anthropology… aaaah.

3. Because it’s a way to talk to other anthropologists as if they were human. Anthropologists, more than any other discipline I interact with, suffer from low self-esteem about their discipline.  This problem correlates directly with the level of public awareness and discussion of anthropology, which correlates directly with that bizarre desire to engage in debate in the article or the monograph… Blogging is a way of writing as if you were talking to someone, rather than as if you were saying something once and for all.

Observation: in five years of blogging at savage minds, I have seen less than a handful of comments from established (i.e. famous) anthropologists.  This does not mean they are not reading it (because they do mention it when I meet them), but that this particular form of interaction is still not seen as legitimate.  As long as this is the case, anthropology will fail to be “public” in any meaningful sense, and the famous anthropologists will continue to lament the fact that the New York Times doesn’t write about our work.

What sucks about blogging?

1. your audience. You can’t control it.  It’s not a seminar room, it’s not the AAA.  They ask weird questions, they don’t seem to have read Talal Asad or Emily Martin or whoever, and don’t seem embarrassed by that fact.  Sometimes they are mean. Really mean.  Sometimes they take offence, really take offence, and then it feels like you spend the next three days obsessing about whether you are a bad person.  But most of the time, they actually read what you write, and sometimes are moved to say something, sometimes really nice things (Thank you John McCreery).

2. the 72-hour attention span.  Regardless of how much time you put into a piece, it will only generate attention for 72 hrs, give or take a day.  Most posts disappear without comment.  If you are blessed/cursed as I am to write for a blog that more than 5 people read (and I love ALL SIX of our readers equally), then you will get a comment, two comments, maybe 30 or 40 comments wherein people are arguing and calling each other names and talking about religion and politics (see 4 below). But then it dies down in anticipation of the next post (see 5 below).  Spending longer than 72 hours working on a blog post:  really stupid idea.

3. the space it takes up in your brain.   Posting on a blog causes a temporary behavioral disorder (don’t worry it only lasts 72 hrs, see the previous point).  Kind of like obsessively checking status updates, or in old school terms, walking out to the mailbox every hour.  It’s the anxiety of writing condensed into a small time frame and usually regarding a largely unimportant issue.  If you have this anxiety, I think it is a good thing, because it makes you more conscientious about what you write.  Unfortunately, blogging might not be the best avocation for you.

4. Off topic much? What was the post about again?  Thread hijacking is a frequent feature of the blogosphere.  But really, this isn’t all that different from the seminar room now is it?  Of course, if you want to keep your comments on point, it requires being even more obsessive about your blog posts (see 3 above).

5. Blogging is a relentless activity: it suits people who have always got something they want to say, or those who see something fascinating in everything they observe.  Add to that just a bit of skill in presenting it, and you have a blogger.  The rest of us struggle to come up with interesting topics and takes, while an angry mob of six readers stands virtually outside your door waiting for you to post the next thing.  This is why group blogging is a good idea.  It’s particularly why group blogging with people like Kerim Friedman and Alex Golub (who fit the description above) is a good idea.

How do you write a good blog post?

It should be clear from the above, but let me condense it:

Rule 1. Don’t spend longer writing it than your readers will commenting on it.  The point is communication, not publication.

Lemma 1a. Don’t give up on the craft of writing.  A well constructed blog post is a great thing, and it’s good practice.  It is it’s own genre, a hybrid of a news article, an op-ed piece, an aphorism, and a critical review.

Rule 2.  Blog about anthropology.  Most of our anthropology brethren break this rule, and blog primarily about what’s in the news.  But who needs an anthropology blog to do that?  If it’s about what’s in the news, but also about what anthropology has to say: much better.

Exercise: Blog about a journal article you read recently.  We need far more of this kind of informal discussion of our work.  Think how pleased you would be if someone blogged about your research…  This exercise hones two valuable skills: a) the ability to communicate what an article says and why it is important better than the article does itself and b) the ability to do so in a language and tone that flatters the author, provokes your audience to thought and doesn’t take you longer than a couple of hours.

Rule 3. Love your comments.  If you get them, be grateful, even if they spew vitriol and hate.  Encourage discussion rather than foreclosing it.  But…

Lemma 3a: Never, never, never feed the trolls. Trolls are an invasive species on the internet and the blogosphere is a rich broth for their reproduction.  Only respond to good comments, ignore (i.e. do not respond to or mention) bad ones.

Rule 4: Post early and often. Even though it might seem like no one is reading your posts, believe me, they are, and they will, if they keep coming.  Again, group blog makes this easier.  If you start a blog, post for a month and then stop, people will stop reading it until you start writing again.   Having an audience is an incredibly important aspect of this practice, but you don’t get one without trying.

Lemma 4a.  Communicate with the other blogs in the anthropology blogosphere… tell them about your posts, comment on their posts, link to their blogs, tweet, update, check-in, whatever, but recognize that this is about social intercourse, not armchair reflection.

Rule 5.  Never follow rules written by bloggers.  All Cretans are Liars.

I think I’d like to write separate entries on changes in book and journal length but before I do so I wonder what people’s general responses to these issues are? I know that the twittersphere was all a-tweet about shortened journal article lengths when the changes were made. Has anyone else noticed this but me? Or does anyone else have an opinion on either trend?

We believe that anthropologists have a lot to contribute to development work, but that their knowledge and skills are still underrepresented within the industry. The demand for anthropological expertise is growing, but links between the two fields are still weak. While an informal network faciliates collaboration between a small number of anthropologists and development practitioners, most anthropologists are still out of the reach of development agencies, especially academics and those currently conducting field research.

We aim to address these issues with two tools; an interactive map and a discussion forum. We envisage that the interactive map will formalise collaboration between anthropologists and development practitioners. Meanwhile the discussion forum will provide space for both anthropologists and development practitioners to debate the role of anthropology in development. By joining worldwise development you can be involved in shaping how anthropologists collaborate with development practitioners.

Seems like a great idea! I hope it succeeds in its goal. (NOTE: The website is not yet fully active. Right now it is just an announcement of what they plan to do after launch.) But even more than that, this is exactly the kind of thing I have long been arguing the AAA should be doing on-and-off the web…

(Thanks, again, to Ennis)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) because there isn’t as much anthropology as there is science to report on.

This strikes me as a basic difference. The simple volume of papers and reports published in most natural science and engineering disciplines absolutely dwarfs the number in anthropology. Each year at the annual neuroscience conference in san diego there are over 20,000 posters and papers. There are less than 8K anthropologists in the AAA total. It seems entirely likely to me that anthropology is being swamped by other information. However, the proportion in science reporting doesn’t seem to mirror the distribution of disciplines in universities, nor the number of students working on PhDs. Certainly it reflects the relative wealth and prestige of some sciences over others. And compared against the humanities generally, instead of the sciences, the argument makes somewhat less sense. There isn’t much “humanities” journalism (Chronicle of Higher Ed notwithstanding) either, but the amount of reporting on the arts, history, literature or music that draws on scholarly work also dwarfs the reporting that draws on anthropology to explain culture.

2) because journalists already do what anthropologists do, only better.

How many of us have not had the experience of reading a really quality piece of investigative journalism in which the journalist has done her homework, traveled to the right places, talked to the right people, and basically explained a phenomenon in terms that suggest there is nothing much more to say? All kinds of things that graduate applicants write in their statements of purpose are likely to appear the following month or year in a magazine or newspaper, artfully done and reaching a far larger audience. Kudos to the journalists who pull this off. But that’s never the end of the story. Three weeks later, anthropologists are still puzzling over the significance of the phenomena reported on, and 5 years later are publishing articles that I think generally do a better job of explaining, rather than reporting, the causes, effects and long historical twists and turns of cultural phenomena. Journalists tend to move on. The temporality of anthropological research far from matches that of journalists, just as it is far slower than many of our colleagues in the natural sciences and engineering. Changing that temporality might require a different approach.. and this, I think, is the third reason for a lack of anthropology journalism:

3) because anthropologists do not report on their research.

Cultural anthropologists have no tradition of publishing articles that simply describe their ongoing or recent research in brief but detailed, relatively standardized forms. Instead, the journal article in cultural anthropology is a mini-book, replete with complex forms of argument and narrative, rich, detailed description and a complete list of references in the literature. Whereas many scientists write a synthetic review article of research in their field once every couple of years, sub-fields of anthropology get one per decade, if that. Whereas a brief article reporting some results in science looks like “findings,” a brief article by an anthropologist describing a bit or recent fieldwork looks paltry and insubstantial.

One result of this is that I honestly have no idea what the vast majority of my colleagues in anthropology are working on until well after they are done doing it, and this is a real failure when it comes to making anthropological research appear fresh. If I were king, or Bill Davis, I would require every researching anthropologist to publish a paragraph describing ongoing research in a AAA publication at least once a year. Such a resource, if done correctly and made freely available would of its own accord change the dynamics of attention to the discipline by outsiders.

3a) because anthropologists’ scholarly societies do not report on their research

A corollary to this reason is that the AAA leadership, editors of journals, and staff of the AAA have done little to innovate these forms of scholarly communication in the last 100 years, to say nothing of the last 10, when they have done nothing more than resist such innovation, sometimes on principle (preserving a tradition of scholarly production focused on monographs, books and critical distance, I suppose), sometimes out of fear and anxiety about the very sustainability of the scholarly enterprise. Contrast this with the aggressive (and to be sure, questionable) shift in the sciences towards models of open access, publicity hounding, interaction with journalists, and repackaging of research in a range of scholarly forms (think Freakonomics). Perhaps in the long run, the traditionalism of the AAA will defend us against the craven onslaught of pecuniary interest and cozy complicity with neo-liberal capitalism. But it will be a lonely 21st century.

The most poignant part of the lack of an anthropology journalism for me is that there are lots of things anthropologists know and understand about the world that few others know. I never feel like I understand what’s happening in the world when I listen to NPR, however good their reporting. Sometimes I feel a bit more informed by a New Yorker or Atlantic article. But I always walk away from quality anthropology with a sense that my brain has been rewired and that I now know better why things are happening the way they are… surely journalism can amplify that effect rather than dampen it?

What this means is that if you are on the anthropologists on twitter list and you tweet a link to a news story, you are essentially voting for that story to appear on the front page of the Twitter Tim.es page. Because the list is still small, it only takes a couple of votes, but hopefully as more anthropologists join Twitter it will become even more focused on anthropological topics.

*All are welcome to join the list, but I do ask that at least 1/3rd of your tweets be in English, and that you regularly tweet about matters concerning anthropology. If you’d like to be on the list, just send me a tweet @kerim.

The first thing I would do, if I had the power to do so, would be to ban the reading of papers. It seems to me that there is often an inverse relationship between how famous an anthropologist is and how boring their presentations are. All too often they simply read aloud seven to nine pages of dense double spaced text extracted from their most recent publication. Thanks, but no thanks. I’d rather read the paper at my own pace, thank you. How about trying to learn from the wonderful TED talks? Although the TED curators seem to be a bit too fond of neoliberal and technocratic solutions to the world’s problems, there is no doubt that the talks one finds on that site are rarely boring.

Secondly, putting all the TED talks up as online video might have something to do with the quality of the talks. Surely this keeps presenters on their toes? The SFAA podcast site is a great example of what anthropologists can do in this regard. This should be standard practice at all anthropology conferences, and included in the conference budget. All too often there are a million talks scheduled at the same time, so it would be great to be able to hear the ones you missed later on. It is a great way to “open access” our conferences.

Third, I’d like to see a little more time devoted to discussion. Lets be honest, fifteen minutes is not enough time to present all your data. It seems to me that anything less than forty minutes is going to be little more than an advertisement for your work, encouraging people to read more if they are interested. So why not keep the papers short, maybe under ten minutes, and open up more time to some real discussion. Make the papers available online for those who want to read them.

Finally, I’ve never been to BarCamp, but it seems to be one of many participant-driven “unconferences” like the citizen journalism one I attended at Wikimania 2007. The entire agenda was determined on the spot, with the second round of topics picking up from where we left off at the end of the first round. I loved how dynamic this approach was, compared with what I’m used to at academic conferences. It would be great to open up the format of anthropology conferences to experiment with these other forms. This could even be extended to after the conference is over. Perhaps there could be some kind of built-in mechanism by which each year’s conference builds on questions raised the previous year?