Who is the audience for academic knowledge? When does that audience include not just fellow academics, but also the public? These questions are harder to answer than they should be. Our courses require enrollment and tuition. Our writings require effort to find and afford and read. Our conferences tend to be closed to outsiders and sometimes even to other scholars. As a profession, we simply do not have spaces where we regularly talk with an interested public about our research.

This is a story about academics silencing a public audience. It is about Ivory Tower condescension and how I once defended Adam Yauch’s right to ask a question. Here is what happened:

In April 2002, I participated in a conference on Tibet and the Cold War at Harvard University featuring distinguished scholars of China, India, and Tibet. The conference was a perfect fit with my research on Tibet and the CIA and was fantastic in many ways, until it wasn’t. 

Around 100 Tibetans attended the two-day conference. These were regular community members of all ages, college students and older people, whole families even, and they outnumbered the “academic” audience. For me, it was an unexpected but welcome opportunity to present my research to an audience composed of both academics and the general public. Yet there was discomfort from a handful of other participants about having a non-academic audience. Why was this? Did they think a section of the audience was going to start yelling “Free Tibet” and rush the stage?

Cold War Tibet is a political topic, and sparks flared up periodically between panelists. For their part, the audience—Tibetans and non-Tibetans, academics and the general public—respectfully engaged the presenters, asking questions and offering comments. Then on Day Two controversy arose when a member of the audience asked a question of the panelists. The audience member was Adam Yauch and his question was relatively simple. Why, he wanted to know, did the Chinese care so much about Tibet. “I know why Tibet is an emotional issue for Tibetans,” he said, “but why is Tibet such an emotional issue for the Chinese?”

Who is Adam Yauch? I’m not sure if many of the conference participants knew who he was. In the context of the conference, it didn’t really matter. But it mattered to me. While to my Tibetan friends, Adam Yauch was often simply “Adam,” to me he was MCA of the Beastie Boys.

I was in high school when the Beastie Boys’ debut album Licensed to Ill came out in 1986. In the twenty-five years since, the Beastie Boys have been a consistently incongruous and fun part of our musical and cultural landscape. In the 1990s, Adam Yauch became a practicing Tibetan Buddhist. He co-founded the Milarepa Foundation to support Tibetan artists, and also started the hugely successful Tibetan Freedom Concerts that ran globally from 1996-2003, raising money for and generating awareness about Tibet among young people and musicians. His sincere participation in the Tibetan community extended to his attendance at the Harvard conference. He was there anonymously, not in any sort of “Sabotage”-style disguise, but just incognito as himself at an academic conference. He was quiet until close to the end when he posed his question.

Before anyone on the panel could reply, one of the conference organizers—a Harvard professor—stood up and said forcefully that this was an “academic conference” and that “emotional” questions would not be entertained. He made it clear we were here to discuss real politics in an academic, dispassionate manner. That is: in discussing politics we were to be apolitical.

This was wrong on so many levels.

1. It was the bluntest academic putdown of the public I have ever personally witnessed, an appalling example of academic snobbery.

2. It was also flat-out incorrect; Adam Yauch’s question was entirely academic. It was a question about nationalism, the über-topic of the 1990s, including for cultural, historical, and political scholarship on both Tibet and China.

3. It was an abdication of the political, of the responsibility to speak to difficult issues. And, it was a renunciation of our responsibility as scholars to dialogue with an engaged public.

Immediately after the organizer’s dismissal of the question, I and several other panelists spoke up: the question from the audience was legitimate, this was something scholars absolutely do study, and about which we had things to say. Despite our comments, something had shifted. The audience had been disciplined and spoken down to; the message was ‘you can listen, but we might not let you speak if we don’t like what you have to say.’

At the next break, I went over to Adam Yauch and introduced myself, apologizing for what had just happened and saying that his question was indeed academic, an important and legitimate query, and a question that scholars also ask. He was incredibly gracious, saying he hadn’t meant to cause any friction. We chatted for a short while, talking about China, Tibet, and the value and politics of audience participation in academic conferences. It was a serious and thoughtful conversation with someone who in that moment was simply a member of the public audience, not a famous musician.

This incident has bothered me for a long time. Dismissing individuals who turn to us as experts for answers to their questions is not right. We have multiple spaces where academics can and do speak privately amongst ourselves, and these are important spaces. But we need also to speak publicly. We need to create and embrace occasions to speak directly with communities interested in our research. We need to do this even if it feels uncomfortable; we need to do it especially if it feels uncomfortable.

Ten years have passed since the Harvard conference. I had not planned on writing about what happened there; it was an ugly side of academia and involved a celebrity; the whole thing had felt surreal. Then word came on Friday that Adam Yauch died of cancer after three years fighting the disease. I thought of his music and his commitments, and about his question about people’s attachments to things, about China’s attachment to Tibet, and about our responsibilities as scholars, and I decided it was time to write. This post is a tribute to someone who was our perfect public audience member. Interested in the topic, he came to the conference. Curious to learn more, he asked a question. Committed to the issue, he pressed on after the conference, for as long as he could.

RIP Adam Yauch (August 5, 1964-May 4, 2012).

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado and author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Duke University Press, 2010). She wrote this post while listening to Paul’s Boutique and Ill Communication.

Is Obama inappropriately receiving credit for killing Osama bin Laden? Given the upcoming presidential election it is a question that might be asked for longer than one news cycle. As someone who tries to keep from plunging his head too deeply into the endless torrent of opinion that is the blogosphere, I have to admit that I haven’t fully probed the variety of answers that people are asking here. But as an anthropologist I do want to comment briefly on what anthropology might have to add to this debate.

A lot of ones and zeros have been spilled on how the president can and cannot take responsibility for things that happen during his administration, but I feel like the other side of the question has not been fully addressed: who did kill Osama bin Laden? The guy who pulled the trigger? In my experience most military folks refuse to take credit for accomplishments that belong to their whole squad. Should we credit the entire SEAL team that went to Abbotabad? But of course it took JSOC to find Osama bin Laden, and it took a lot of taxpayer money to fund JSOC… The problem is not whether one particular person can take credit for killing Osama bin Laden, the problem is trying to understand why we think individuals are the right sort of thing to take credit for actions at all.

My point is that America is an individualistic society. We see the individual as the basic unit of action, the basic bearer or right, and the basic unit of responsibility. In general Americans feel responsibility for an act comes from having the choice to make it, and then making it. This individual-focused understanding of responsibility and agency is fairly widely-spread but I reckon this is due mostly to diffusion, which is to say: colonialism. It is built on an image of people as uncaused actors, actors whose action is caused by their own choices.

But as many people in many different cultures recognize, people can only get things done by working in concert with other people (and a fair amount of objects to boot). And in fact, our own desires to do different things are instilled in us by a huge network of other people and things (bottles, diapers, aunts, staff sergeants). This is the classical anthropological lesson: individualist explanations are compelling to us because they fit our culture, not because they are the best explanation of the data.

Our moral reasoning falls apart when we can no longer see the individuals the bearer of responsibility. This is a tremendous problem, since the most important issues of our time are system ones: the flip side of ‘who killed Osama bin Laden’ is ‘who is created the recession’. We anthropologists have gotten very good at empirical analysis of systematic effects, and we even have some pretty good ideas about how to fix things. But our moral accounts of responsibility are totally out of whack. This is true of the left as well as the right, the activists and the apologists. When people are poor, lefty anthropologists blame the system for making them that way, but when they ruin the global financial system, suddenly it is the fault of elites and not their culture. Or, in the heat of the moment, we simply don’t worry about figuring out who is to blame at all.

I think anthropology has a lot to contribute to a sustained ethical discussion about what happens to the concept of responsibility when it is dissolved in the concept of system — a discussion that makes sense of both left and right objections to the way systemic affects are blamed on individuals. Uh… not that I have any answers at the moment. But if you all could figure that out in the comments then I’d, you know, appreciate it.

it has become easier to steal information remotely because of the Internet, the proliferation of smartphones and the inclination of employees to plug their personal devices into workplace networks and cart proprietary information around. Hackers’ preferred modus operandi, security experts say, is to break into employees’ portable devices and leapfrog into employers’ networks — stealing secrets while leaving nary a trace.

I mention this because it is also a serious concern for anthropologists I know who do research in China. We here on Savage Minds have written a lot about using digital tools for research, but it is also worth thinking about the vulnerabilities such tools create for one’s informants. There are a lot of tools one can use to encrypt data, but they are useless if some Lisbeth Salander has already hacked into your computer and stolen the password. How paranoid should we be? What steps can we take to protect our digital data? Please use this as an open thread to discuss these issues.

Simpson is focused on institutional review more than ethical guidelines, but since one exists largely to facilitate the other, it is worth looking at the problems Simpson argues emerge within the review process:

At the outset, there is a serious disjunction between the way in which research is thought about in the context of ethical review and the way in which ethnographic research unfolds according to its own temporality and logic: that is, following the contours of social life as these are revealed by the persons with whom one engages in the field.

I find particularly compelling his argument that the anthropological subject does not easily fit the notion of a “human subject” presumed by medical ethics (whether medical subjects do or not is another question):

However, whilst anthropologists engage with subjects who are indeed human, they would not normally think of themselves as studying ‘human subjects’ in the medical sense, or as part of the legacy of experimentation described above. The vocabulary of subjectivation used by anthropologists is far richer and ranges through informants, interlocutors, consociates, collaborators, consultants. and friends. All of these suggest a relationship with a person for which the reduction to a corporeal ethics is likely to be at odds. Fundamentally, selfhood is seen as a situationally defined project, rather than one to be defined essentially. In this vein, Battaglia has argued for an ‘ethics of the open subject’ and, drawing on Haraway, takes a position which questions the ‘skin-bound individual as the natural boundary of the total person’ (1999: 135). In this approach, there is a profound acknowledgement of the relationality of the human subject. Furthermore, to talk of the ‘field’ is to talk of an entity which is itself relational and not merely spatial. The anthropologist, to a greater or lesser extent, becomes part of this field as a moral agent who is subject to evaluation by those engaged with when in the ‘field’. Subjects, by means of their own processes of counter-subjectivation, locate the researcher in terms of motive, intent, and the level of threat or danger that his or her presence brings, now and in the future (Carrithers 2005; Simpson 2005).

In conclusion he suggests that there are a series of three ethical moments that emerge throughout the research process. This section was a bit confusing for me at first, but then I realized that it was only in the current model that these three moments exist as distinct points in time. Simpson’s critique is actually to challenge the notion that the planning, fieldwork, and writing stages of ethnography have clearly delineated ethical moments. With regard to ethical review at the start of the fieldwork process, Simpson emphasizes that ethical choices are an iterative process and that facing them requires a recognition of the “skill of the ethnographer as a moral being capable of reflexive awareness and an anticipation of the consequences of action and inaction.” Ethical dilemmas cannot be headed off at the outset by fiat.

With regard to the second moment, that of fieldwork, Simpson argues that “the possibilities for communication before, during, and after fieldwork are radically altering foundational tropes such as ‘field’, ‘immersion’, and ‘informant.’” As such, he sees ethics as something that should be the basis of continual dialog throughout the research process and advocates a process whereby ethnographers engage in an ongoing discussion of ethical issues with mentors rather than a one-time review.

The third moment is the writing process:

Confronted with this large and complex cloth, decisions must be made (alone or in consultation with informants) regarding what cuts to make: what goes into the text and what is to be left out; who gets named and who doesn’t; what it is legitimate to expose on ethical grounds and what must be concealed on ethical grounds. This is the moment at which an anthropologist’s judgements about just what is the appropriate relationship between informants, truths, and publics is laid open to challenge. Yet, just as fieldwork itself was once a ‘black box’, the ethics and politics of selection that underpin the writing of ethnography are rarely made explicit.

This last part is of particular interest to me, as I am currently writing a paper about how the process of collaborating on Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! led to certain topics being left out of the film at the request of the community. In doing so, I argue that these ethical decisions can only be understood with the benefit of a historical and ethnographic analysis of the community (which I then proceed to provide in the paper). Thus an understanding of the ethical issues emerged as the result of the ethnographic process, not as something prior to it, although a commitment to a collaborative ethnographic process allowed for these issues to emerge in the first place.

Finally, to Simpsons argument that ethics are not something which can be followed programmatically, but a “skill of the ethnographer as a moral being” I would add that skill an ethnographer is also necessary. Creating a multivocal text (visual or written) is not easy and requires a degree of skill and training. A deep knowledge of the genre and the “tricks of the trade” is necessary to know how to handle ethical dilemmas in an elegant way rather than simply shying away from difficult topics. It is perhaps this, more than anything, which makes me wary of a formulaic review process, as I worry that they leave little room for creative solutions to ethical problems, preferring instead bureaucratic ones.

UPDATE: Edited for clarity.

I want to begin by applauding the New York Times and Danny Hakim for devoting considerable energies to their Abused and Used series exposing the deadly peril within NY state’s system of care for people with developmental disabilities. It’s not exactly a hot topic for an exposè.

But I was angry that in their contribution to the series this weekend, Hakim and co-author Russ Beuttner fed into ideas about people with disabilities that are part of the same deadly system their work has the potential to undermine.

Their focus on broken rules and poor regulation presents people with developmental disabilities as troublesome things to be managed and “dealt with.” Even their retelling of the story of James Taylor’s death conveys his life through burdens felt by others. Despite the candor and care of his mother and sister, visible in this accompanying video, Mr. Taylor’s life is primarily depicted as dead weight.

To be fair, the coverage reflects a double bind: these lives are not valued, so the series focuses on death and abuse in order to get attention. But in focusing on death and abuse, the series suggests it is deaths rather than lives that are worth attention, intervention, and resources.

So why do we care more about how some people die than how they live? As Mr. Taylor’s sister puts it: “these sorts of people are not valued in society”. This is true, but unsatisfying. We need also to ask what makes some people, but not others, people of “these sorts”.

The Used and Abused series confirms a common sense answer: These people are sorted by the biological facts of impairment; the neck that doesn’t support the head any better than a newborn, the brain that is ‘developmentally equivalent’ to a three-month-old’s. Those are facts of Mr. Taylor’s impairment due to cerebral palsy as described by Hakim and Buettner.

But this common sense is nonsense. Mr. Taylor was a 41-year-old man, not a baby. Comparing him to an infant is an (evocative, ubiquitous, offensive) analogy, not a statement of biological fact. And the strength of his neck does not explain why he was made to live in conditions that killed him.

I did fieldwork with injured U.S. soldiers rehabilitating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As the NYT, Washington Post, and others have reported, soldiers often sustain brain injuries with major cognitive consequences. But we don’t evaluate injured soldiers the same way as Mr. Taylor—even when their brains are injured or literally missing.

Yet there may be no quantifiable difference between how someone with cerebral palsy can think and how a brain injured soldier can think. Nonetheless, we actively support the life of an injured soldier but merely try to prevent the death of people like Mr. Taylor.

The difference between these two “sorts of people” (or kinds of people, as Ian Hacking might put it) is one we make. It is rooted in morally weighted social facts, not biological ones. It is about the lives we value as a society and those we do not to. This is a basic human inequity for which we bear collective responsibility. Luckily, it is one all of us can work to change.

What attention it has gotten has largely been positive, such as this glowing review in CounterPunch, or this blog post by Louis Proyect. A review in VAR was slightly more critical, but not by much. Still, the following comment from Stephen Broomer’s review gets to the heart of the matter:

Padilha’s contribution to this debate is confined within the limits of documentary form. Secrets of the Tribe is a narrative-driven documentary, and as such it privileges dramatic contrast over the reinforcement of facts or proof.

Indeed, I would go much further. The film struck me as little more than tabloid journalism, reveling in salacious scandals, academic cat fights, and conspiracy theories in the name of discussing research ethics and scientific methodology. It reminded me of one of those local news stories where a reporter exclaims how shocked he is to discover that there is prostitution in his city while the camera indulges in digitally blurred closeups of exposed female flesh.

In comparing this film to tabloid journalism I don’t mean to impute Padilha’s motives. Padilha is clearly someone who cares deeply about Brazil’s indigenous population. He also deserves credit for actually interviewing Yanomami for the film. But Padilha is not an anthropologist. As one review put it: “A student of math and physics, Padilha turned to filmmaking after a brief, unsatisfying career in banking.” (He is most famous for “Bus 174″ about a hijacked bus in Rio.) For this reason he seems unable to meaningfully engage with contemporary debates about fieldwork practices or the nature of anthropological research.

I don’t really know which bothered me more: the lumping together of pedophilia accusations against Jacques Lizot and Kenneth Good with Patrick Tierney’s accusations against James Neel and Napoleon Chagnon, the fact that the film completely ignored Tim Asch even as it relies extensively on his footage, or the way it presented anthropological epistemology as a simplistic choice between the hard-science of sociobiology on the one hand and mushy-headed cultural relativism on the other.

What really upsets me is that these are serious issues, which warrant serious discussion. By simplifying the scientific debates and lumping them together with pedophilia accusations, the film missed a unique opportunity to make an important contribution to the popular understanding of anthropology. Too bad.

The film is partly the tragic story of the chimpanzee, Nim, brought up as a human baby in a New York brownstone, breast fed by his `foster mother’ and taught sign language by a succession of young, mostly female, research assistants.

As Nim matures into adult chimphood his massive strength and capacity to bite mean that he can no longer be contained in a human environment without posing considerable risk to the research team. He is returned to the primate facility where he was born, a brutal environment where electric cattle prods are used to control the animals, who are eventually sold on to a medical research laboratory. Campaigning by one of his previous carers and the intervention of a lawyer prepared to extend arguments about human rights to animals raised as human leads to Nim’s eventual rescue and he ends his days in an animal sanctuary where he is ultimately reunited with some of the other chimps from the laboratory.

Nim’s problematic behaviour as he grows up is oriented toward his quest for dominance, the natural behaviour of an adult male chimpanzee. Nim’s carers and the research staff assigned to work with him have to become adept at displaying dominance in the right way or risk serious injury.Dominance matters in other ways not restricted to the social universe of chimpanzees. The film presents a visual snapshot of the hierarchies of power and domination which structured academic life in the 1970s through the relationships between the lead scientist and his junior, mostly female, assistants. The assistants undertake the bulk of the day to day work of experimentation and hand on care for the chimpanzee. The professor does, disseminates and takes credit for the `science’, at one point totally altering his own interpretation of the significance of the experiment. In his view, which differed from that of the people who spent their daily lives interacting with the animal, the inability of chimpanzees to structure sentences grammatically was conclusive proof that they lacked the capacity for language.

Of course, the professor’s narrow definition of language as opposed to a wider concept of communication and the divergences of interpretation are of considerable interest, not least in demonstrating the ways in which the framing of a research object determines the scope of what can be considered findings within a particular scientific paradigm, the kind of narrow cause and effect paradigm we face on our forays into Grantlandia’s uncertain territory. But what struck me about this film was its insight into laboratory life in another era, and the ways in which some things change and some things become institutionalized to the point of being foundational.

The institutionalization of ethical review and changes in the legal framework about experiments on animals in many countries mean that what happened to Nim hopefully could not happen again so easily. I am less certain about the imbalance of power between lead scientists and staff, between seniors and juniors. While the gender dimensions of exploitation exposed in the film may be less prevalent today there is no doubt that current mechanisms for funding and employment in Universities in the UK and the US work to promote the silverback and embed this kind of structural hierarchy.

The move towards funding modalities of large projects modeled on the natural sciences system raises questions for anthropologists who have worked as individual scholars, contributing to team endeavors certainly, but not seeking to produce data on which a `lead scientist’ can pronounce. In such situations how do we manage the balance between individual contribution and `scientific case’? What are the lines of authorship and ownership between the project leader who holds the funding and researcher in the field? To what extent are conventions of multiple authorship coming in to anthropology as these funding relations alter the social organization of our work? Given the climate in Grantlandia is the future for more of us, especially postdocs, jobbing support to other, often interdisciplinary, projects?

(Freedoms, all of them)

I’ll stop with this one, I promise. But it is in some ways where I should begin. That freedom is an interesting problematic obviously has little to do with whether or not anthropologists can wield it as a concept (that’s just me deferring to the putative audience here). Rather it is a simple empirical fact that freedom–both as slogan and as a thing–is relentlessly present in global society–and especially in the domains of high tech science and engineering. The ideological use of the slogan to brand just about anything is (should be) fair game for many different scholars of contemporary discourse (see e.g. Wendy Chun’s work). But as a starting point, consider only the image to the right, which collects 9 pages of logos that use “freedom” to sell something.

These uses come from both the left and the right, and they have a certain visual consistency to them: images of upheld arms, liberated birds, broken chains are nearly ubiquitous. When a logo emphasizes a flag, a gun or an eagle it is more obviously right-leaning, when it uses a sans-serif font, the color green, or a raised fist, it is more likely a left-leaning cause. Revealingly, the same experiment with the word “liberty” is much more uniform in the use of red, white and blue, the statue of liberty (especially her spiky hat… what is that called anyways?) and only occasionally a broken bell. This analysis could all be done much more expertly, I’m certain, though it hasn’t really been. (Though I can’t resist mentioning a smorgasbord of a book by Svetlana Boym which is obliquely engaged in such a project of cultural and visual analysis).

But what such an analysis tells us is that freedom has a particular ideological role in the process of our collective deliberations and arguments in the global media-scape. In it’s most cynical version, the talk of freedom is simply a particularly effective mask for other interests. I am quite positive that linguistic anthropologists could capably explore the uses of sloganry like this, should they want to, and perhaps even expose something interesting about the reliance on the term; or explain how it differs from others like justice (scales anyone?) equality (rainbows and equal signs?) or sustainability (green, green, green and circular).

However, this sloganry, I submit, is not the only thing–or the most important thing–happening when people speak about freedom. There are also a very wide range of attempts to make freedom occur in the world. This is not about the word or its discursive use, fascinating though it be, but about the practices, technologies, organizations and events created in order to bring freedom into existence–to make freedom doable. I submit that many people in the world who use the word freedom both believe in it as a concept and are frustrated by its jingoistic use, and so are interested in finding ways to make it real and pursuable as a problem.

Which is to say, they are all asking, just as anthropologists might, “what exactly do you mean by freedom?”

Many such people may not even use the word freedom, probably for exactly this reason, even though they remain concerned with the problems of justice, agency, non-interference, non-domination, arbitrary power, causality and responsibility or other components of the concept of freedom. But many groups do earnestly label their efforts this way: Free Software, the Freedom Box, the Freedom Fone, Freedom to Tinker, Freedom to Read, Freedom to Connect, Free Speech TV, Free Culture, Freedom to Marry; and that’s just the tip of a large frosty beverage.

All of these things are specific projects or goals (unlike ‘free trade’ or ‘free markets’ which have somehow gone on beyond meaning anything at all). Some of these things, like the Freedom to Marry campaign(s) are straightforwardly activist and focused on specific policy issues. “Freedom to Marry” is strictly equivalent to “Right to Marry” and so involves the expansion of precise legal rights in specific jurisdictions. Something like “Free Speech TV” is focused on bringing freedom into existence (in the what seems like a roundabout way, really) by “inspir[ing] viewers to become civically engaged to build a more just, equitable, and sustainable society.”

But several things of this sort (most obviously “Free Software”) are in fact specific attempts to create freedom in non-policy senses. They are not (principally) about changing laws, or engaging in deliberation or activism towards the changing of laws, but about creating technologies, organizations, tools or infrastructures that the creators both intend and believe will result in freedom. The Freedom Box, for instance is a relatively recent project to create an alternative to “cloud computing”–it is inspired by Eben Moglen (early co-director of the Free Software Foundation) and his 2010 talk on “Freedom in the Cloud” at the, wait for it, Software Freedom Law Center. The goals of the project are more likely to be concerned less with freedom and more with privacy, anonymity, security and individual control–but it is nonetheless called the Freedom Box, not the Privacy Box or the Individual Control Box, which admittedly ring kind of hollow as names.

Now, at some level the people involved in these projects are engaged in exactly the kind of ethical cultivation that Foucault and Faubion articulate (See part 4)–but with freedom as the telos of that practice as well as its ground. Free Software advocates are famously devoted to a kind of acetic practice of purifying their own software environment; it has its mystics (Donald Knuth), it’s mendicants (Richard Stallman) and its dojo (The command line of the GNU/Linux Operating system). They possess the freedom necessary to engage in these practices by virtue of being either independently wealthy, academics, or well-paid during the day. But as I say, freedom is also the telos of this practice as well as its ground, and that has particular implications which are diagnostic not just of free software, but of contemporary scientific and engineering practice generally.

As an aside, these ethical subjects can be distinguished from other geeks in precisely this respect: it is possible to become a “geeky” ethical subject whose telos is not freedom, but some other goal: entertainment, economic efficiency, mastery of technology, “community” etc. And it is also possible to NOT have the freedom to become an ethical subject in this sense. And perhaps it goes without saying, but it is also possible to have freedom as a telos without at all being concerned with technology, software, science etc.

With freedom as a telos, the problem becomes not just how to behave towards oneself and others, but enabling others to have the freedom these ethical subjects seek to cultivate in themselves. At the very heart of Free Software, for instance, is the suspicion that software tools are necessary to life–for expression, creation, communication and at some level, for ethical cultivation–and that it therefore matters how they are constructed because it will affect the ability of other people to achieve freedom (or to achieve an ethics based on the freedom these tools enable in them). I think this sounds absurd to many people because it gives software too much credit–it makes it out to be the essence of life rather than a simple adjunct. But it does not sound at all absurd to really serious makes of software or devices.

Two things follow from the effort to enable other people’s freedom through the creation of software: 1) this perhaps takes the activity out of the domain of ethical cultivation and into the domain of politics (in the sense Arendt gives it), the domain of work and making, with the implication that it becomes an eminently public activity rather than a private or subjective one; and 2) it invokes exactly that concern which first Mill and then Isaiah Berlin identified: any version of freedom that forces other people to adopt a particular practice–even in the name of freedom–is not worthy of the name. Freedom is freedom from (negative freedom), not a substantive form of life imposed on others in order to make them free (positive freedom). Many who despise the most “ideological” Free Software advocates (or Free Culture, or “Freedom to Marry” people) do so on exactly the latter count: you can’t force me to be free.

But, people who create Free Software or Free Culture are not doing it sui generis; they are not attempting to impose a form of freedom they have invented, or somehow, in some ideal sense, believe exists and can only be accessed through their creations. Rather they are responding to a context in which they perceive the status quo to be one of domination.

Return for a moment to the “ideological” slogans of freedom. The de facto mode of marketing almost all new technologies is to emphasize how they will liberate us, free us from drudgery, create new possibilities for action we had never imagined, etc. (iPad 3 will make you free! Internet Freedom will topple regimes!). It is a very common intuition that what they actually do is “enslave” us, and in more than one way. First by subjecting us to a form of life, a mode of interacting with devices and other people that we had no role in cultivating and second, they dominate us in the very freedom-specific sense of creating a form of arbitrary power to which we must submit if we wish to use them. The former of these is the more ambivalent: sometimes we do want other people to invent new forms of life and to offer us the chance to adopt them. Sometimes, these technologies do enable forms of life that were impossible without them. Good/bad design, good/bad architecture, good/bad city planning all participate in a similar ambivalence. We love this city so we submit to the traffic problem; or we love this building because it enables certain forms of life so we submit to the fact that it is has bad ventilation, and so on. But it is the second of these implications to which much of the high-tech talk of “freedom” in free software, free culture, freedom in the cloud, responds today: non-domination.

Free Software is a practice of making that responds to the fact that most, if not all, new technologies are provided by corporations who possess a form of arbitrary power over their users. It is not a question of active interference by these corporations (except when it is)–active invasion of privacy or even passive surveillance (except when it is). Rather it is the fact that these entities’ power is arbitrary which angers and motivates these actors.

This is where being careful about the meaning of freedom is helpful. For those who would define freedom strictly as noninterference (strong “negative liberty” in Berlin’s sense) in the context of technological infrastructures, the paradox of the “contented slave” confronts them. It is eminently possible that we could live happily with Apple, Google, Facebook and a handful of other mega-corporations who promise not to do evil; it is possible to never experience either harm or interference from them–but we will still be subject to their arbitrary power, which is to say, they reserve the right to interfere when it serves their interests, not ours. For those who would define freedom as non-domination, then this is most certainly an unfree state of affairs.

There is an unease here, primarily for philosophers, I think, because they tend to associate power strictly with the State, and not with corporations, who are more likely to be seen as actors vis-a-vis the State. But they can be both (dominating citizens and dominated by the State; or in some cases, pace rupert murdoch, dominating both citizens and the State), and we really have no theory of freedom to adequately account for this complex relation.

So this is all a roundabout way of explaining that the kind of freedom that concerns those in the high-tech world, and especially in Free Software circles, is of the civic republican kind. It could, if people were better at using this language, answer the kinds of insipid concerns usually trotted out around privacy, security or surveillance, as in “Why should I worry if I’ve done nothing wrong” or the increasingly elaborate privacy controls of Facebook or “circles” of Google+ (by the way, is that circle as in “vicious” or circle as in “of hell”?). The notion of freedom as non-domination is about whether or not there is arbitrary power over your privacy, your security or your surveillance–not about your actions or your fine-grained ability to control who sees what about you. Though it does not account for anyone who desires to be dominated because it “makes my life easier”–that I have no explanation for yet.

If freedom is defined as non-domination then, a different more interesting problem confronts us: how do you make power non-arbitrary? From the perspective of political theory, non-arbitrary power is familiar, if not easy to achieve: it’s the rule of law, it’s democratic accountability, it’s the balance of power, it’s the public sphere as a check on power. But is this also how we make a corporate power non-arbitrary? What about a technology?

Free Software is a very particular (techno-legal) way of attempting to make power non-arbitrary. It is about designing and creating legally protected objects whose technical detail and structure is visible (open source) and whose legal existence is communal (Free Software license), and which commons is implicitly managed by organizations devoted to maintaining this form of freedom (formal enterprises whose goal is the collective maintenance of free software). That is not the only way to create non-arbitrary power, perhaps not even the best way. But that is it’s goal. It does this within the context of State power, but it achieves it through privately ordered groups of people who seek to bring freedom into existence this way.

My point, at least for the anthropologists, if not the philosophers, is that this is an example of how freedom is made doable in a concrete, empirically specifiable way. As far as I know, none of the Free Software advocates, nor any of the lawyers who observe it, talk about freedom in this philosophically precise way (with the possible exception of Lewis Hyde’s recent book). So it is not the case that the philosophical concept of freedom somehow determines or descends into the empirical realm to order the actions of people. Rather, there is an intuition, a context, perhaps a mode of ethical cultivation, which is attempting to achieve results that can be accurately understood with this set of philosophical distinctions. It is in this manner that freedom can be understood as a problem in the world, and anthropological inquiry as a form of empirical philosophy.

And that is all I got.

I, of course, prefer the anthropology of morels.

But that being said, there are in fact a lot of other “Anthropologies of…” which border very closely on anthropology of freedom, and I want to dwell (at too much length) on one of them here: the anthropology of ethics. There is another one going by the label of an “Anthropology of the Will” which will have to wait until whoever has the book checked out returns it to the library, cause there is no way I will pay $55 for it, thank you very much Stanford University Press. There is also the “Anthropology of Happiness” which insofar as freedom is a means rather than an end might be something anthropologists do study. I’m much too pessimistic for that.

But the anthropology of ethics has finally arrived. This year has seen the publication of two books: Ordinary Ethics, (a semi-reasonable $30, $21.99 on Amazon) ed. by Michael Lambeck, and James Faubion’s An Anthropology of Ethics (ditto). The former is a great collection of essays that includes both anthropologists and philosophers (and includes one from Faubion), the latter is likely to appeal to me, Rex, and like 5 other people, which says nothing about how awesome it is, but rather, indicates a perhaps perverse pleasure in being inside James Faubion’s brain. Nonetheless, both of them lay out some problems and concepts for an anthropology of ethics in rigorous and satisfying ways.

It should be said that the “anthropology of ethics” referenced here probably means many things to many people: the parochial problem of our own ethics in anthropology, the newer problem of the bureaucratization of virtue, which we have dwelled on here and which includes the handful of people studying Institutional Review Boards (Rena Lederman, Annelise Riles, Charles Bosk, etc), the rise of an ethics industry, esp. bioethics, and so forth. But Lambek, Faubion and crew sustain an interest in ethics by asking to what extent ethics is a problem for empirical investigation by anthropologists. Is it a “field” of investigation, a method, a universal feature of human life, etc?

Clearly, they are not alone in this, since the 2000s might fairly be characterized as the decade of evolutionary psychology, wherein the
putative discovery of the “moral organ” (which is apparently shaped like a trolley, and is responsible for the rise and fall of reputations of Harvard professors) has occured and led to hundreds if not thousands of studies identifying “morality” as a universal biological feature of animals. And let me just point out that, ipso facto, there is no actual debate here because a) the kinds of actions and effects we call moral or ethical can be biological without being the same everywhere and b) evolutionary psychologists are rarely interested in defining morality or ethics as such, and more interested in looking for effects that might lead to a theory of what those things are. If there is a debate, it is probably at the level of the efficacy of the discursive, i.e. to what extent is the phenomena of an ethical action inextricably a problem of its circulation in discourse? Experimental social scientists will reduce this to a problem of experimental design, interpretive social scientists will not let it go.

But I digress. There have been calls for an anthropology of ethics and/or morality (and I more or less buy the claim made by both Faubion and Lambek, that it is not a good idea to insist that there is a distinction between the two). In a “debate” in Anthropological Theory in 2008, Didier Fassin and Wiktor Stoczkowski briefly addressed the issue. The debate exemplifies the problem of the anthropology of ethics, viz. is it about an anthropology of morals (or ethics) as a particular real object of study in the world, or is it about the morality or ethics (or by implication, objectivity or political commitment) of the anthropologist. The latter reflects what I referred to in a previous post as political anthropology’s distaste for the concept of freedom: it is a normative commitment, not a thing in the world capable of being studied. Anthropologists (should, some say without irony) shy away from normative terms, especially those that seem to be “western” in origin. (I say ‘seem to be’ because that attribution [e.g. "Freedom is a western notion"] entails both an empirical claim which is not necessarily justified, and a morality in which the concept is both original to “us” and therefore either good or bad, depending on who’s talking.)

But both Lambek’s and Faubion’s book are arguing for the former: that ethics is an empirical field, not just a problem of research orientation. Lambek in particular is keen to make ethics a feature of action generally, and not just one of those “anthropologies of…” domains like politics, art, religion etc. One is not ethical only when in church or when helping the poor, one is ethical at least as regularly as one’s mind is in one’s body. Action has an ethical quality. To the extent that we are comfortable with the claim that all people act, we should be comfortable with the claim that all people act in an ethically specific manner (which is different than the colloquially distorted meaning of “he acted ethically” which is an attribution of having done good).

Faubion, perhaps predictably, is eager to elaborate an anthropology of ethics based in Foucault’s work, and especially that of the last years of his life when problems of askesis, parrhesia, and self-fashioning came to dominate his research. For both Faubion and Lambek (and his contributors) there is a relatively sharp distinction drawn between a Kantian form of ethics, and a Foucaultian one (for the record, Lambek has placed his bets on a return to Aristotle’s understanding of ethics, action and judgement, which he elaborates in the first chapter of the volume, whereas Faubion’s unlikely dark horse is Niklas Luhmann).

Ethics in Kant’s sense is (often caricatured as) the setting of a categorical imperative (a law) by which one must act. Thus Kantian ethics reduces ethics to a problem of reason, which in practical terms creates rules that must be followed (obligations) rather than a series of judgements strongly conditioned by or even determined by, circumstances. This “rule-following” ethics allows for a subject who approaches action as driven by (and subordinate to) his/her own priniciple (arrived at by virtue of reason). (And then there is the Weberian elaboration on this, which I won’t go into here). Freedom, therefore, is the ability to act in accordance with these principles.

Ethical practice in Foucault’s sense is much different. It is frequently laid out (as it is in these two texts) as consisting of four components 1) the part of oneself that is the object of an ethics (sex, religion, work etc); 2) the mode of subjection (reason, divine law, natural law, biology); 3) the substance or means of ethical self-fashioning; and 4) the goal or telos of ethical self-fashioning. Considered according to this schema, the Foucaultian definition of ethics allows us to make sense of how individuals submit to things that seem to be the opposite of freedom (Laidlaw’s examples of Jain ascetisism, Mahmood’s pietist cults in Egypt, etc.). Insofar as the choice is available to them to pursue this kind of ethical self-fashioning, they are engaging in what Foucault called “ethics as the practice of freedom.”

So given this sketchy outline, one might ask: is the problems of Freedom a subset of the problem of ethics, or a separate but related one? Can one have an anthropology of ethics without the concept of freedom? And if not, is freedom something to be explored concurrently with ethics, or is it something that requires a more careful separation and analysis. Under the Kantian version, freedom is more or less straightforwardly about non-interference, and in particular, non- interference with the ethical rules arrived at by way of reason–the categorical imperative. Under the Foucaultian version, the question arises of whether freedom is means or end or both. At some level the freedom to self-fashion is separate from an ethical life oriented towards living freely or achieving freedom. Whether there is freedom to self-fashion takes freedom out of the domain of the ethical, but treating it as a telos, leaves it within the domain of ethics.

It is at this point that I think the work done by philosophers to specify the problem of freedom is actually helpful. So consider how
the political philosopher Philp Pettit approaches the problem. In philosophy, the problem of freedom is divided up into separate problems: the individual, psychological problem of free will vs. determinism
(so-called compatibilism debates) and the political problem of liberty. Pettit argues for reintegrating them both because they were origincally integrated as problems from Hobbes through Kant and because a solution to both problems is more compelling than a solution to either one separately (this is implicitly an indictment of philosophy’s previous work of distinguishing them as different kinds of problems, but he doesn’t say that).

Pettit’s reasoning is that there is a compelling solution to both and it comes from the tradition of “civic republicanism” that has seen much revival as of late. One way in which this tradition is useful is that it mediates between the negative and positive versions of liberty. Republican theorists are disatisfied with the notion that non-interference (negative liberty) is sufficient because it leads to the problem of the contented slave (e.g. a slave who is well provided for and whose master does not interfere in anything that s/he wants tod). Clearly the problem of being a slave, even a happy one is intuitively anathema to most any notion of freedom. But republican theorists are also suspicious of any positive freedom that forces people to do what is right (i.e. you must live this way because it enhances your freedom). The solution is what they call non-domination, which is defined as not being subject to arbitrary power. Freedom for republican theorists requires both non-interference and a kind of structural or institutional relationship which is not arbitrary (i.e. always potentially capable of restricting freedom).

I’m not a philosopher (nor apparently am I an anthropologist, but whatever), so I can’t say whether Kant’s version of things can deal with these problems. At the level of the individual, the categorical imperative does seem to be strictly about the assertion of individual powers, and makes no reference to the structural, institutional or background context of that power. But in the Foucaultian case, there are two different kinds of freedom at stake: the first the ability to self-fashion: to engage in practices of self-fashioning (asceticism, for instance; or good samaritanism) guided by a mode of subjection (reason, the divine law, psychadelic experience etc) oriented towards a goal without interference either directly or as a result of some system of domination. The second however is to make freedom (whether as non-interference or non-domination) into a goal, and here it seems to me to matter what kind of freedom one chooses. If one is going to fashion onself as a freedom-fighter, for instance, the goal of freedom as radical non-interference (the libertarian) implies different practices than does the goal of freedom as non-domination (civic republicanism). This of course, implies “the freedom to fight for freedom” or the “freedom to make onself free” which only sounds paradoxical, but is not in fact. And it’s also why, I think, James Faubion’s case for an anthropology of ethics appeals to “auto-poietic”
systems in a Luhmannian sense. But that is neither here nor there. Or it’s way beyond there.

In any case, if there is a point to this post for anyone who hasn’t rightfully given up by now, it is that freedom as a concept that incorporates both the individual problematic of action, and the political problem of domination seems to be to be uniquely related to the kinds of “structure and agency” problems that anthropologists are interested in, but are loath to investigate under this label… for reasons already enumerated. If there is a programmatic aspect to my thinking here, then it is that the exploration of the theoretical variations in he concept of freedom can illuminate and help explain the kinds of actions people undertake not just when they are being ethical, but when they take the possibility of ethical action under consideration as a goal in itself.

I read two different ethnographies this past semester that put photography to use in some very different ways.  One was Laughter Out of Place by Donna M. Goldstein.  She made the editorial choice to obscure the faces of her research participants.  This results in dark, ominous images throughout the text that have a somewhat unsettling feel.  Interestingly, Goldstein consciously decided to keep her subjects anonymous even though they were seemingly open to having their portraits in her book:

While all of the people I came to know were enthusiastic about the prospect of having their photographs appear in a published book, I have chosen to fog their expressive and aesthetically pleasing faces to ensure their personal security (Goldstein 2003:2).

Goldstein’s decisions were anything but simple.   Her research participants were dealing with very real personal dangers in many cases, so the question of anonymity is absolutely critical.  Still, considering the fact that her research subjects expected to be pictured in her publication, did she make the right call?  When should the wishes of people be set aside in the name of security and safety?  Are anthropologists the ones who should make these sorts of decisions?  Or should these choices be made, and agreed upon, in a collaborative manner?  Are there cases in which ethnographers have to make the command decision and do what they think is best?

These are incredibly complex questions, and there isn’t some simple rubric that can give us the answers we need. Again, I am not denying the basic reasoning behind Goldstein’s actions, let alone the fact that such decisions are immensely complex. I understand the reasons why ethnographers keep names and places anonymous. Yet I wonder if this technique is always the right path. Mostly, this has me thinking about the ultimate use and purpose of ethnographic texts. Maybe, in some cases and for some purposes, obscuring faces and effacing names is definitely the best decision. Goldstein argues for the need to give voice, and to represent the real lives of the people she knows so intimately. But what power do they have, ultimately, when they no longer have names or faces? Are these women really speaking through this text, or have they been silenced in the name of IRBs, liability, and ethical decisions? What’s the use of all of the detail, context, and discussions about structural power if people might not even recognize their own stories?

The other photographically-inclined ethnography I read this past semester was Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg’s Righteous Dopefiend, which utilizes a pretty different tactic than Laughter Out of Place.  The faces of research subjects are prominently displayed, yet their names are kept anonymous.  This, despite the fact that Bourgois and Schonberg’s research subjects “gave Jeff permission to photograph and encouraged is to use their real names when they signed the bureaucratic informed consent documents” (2009:9).  This editorial/photographic tactic allows for readers to witness the brutal lives of Bourgois and Schonberg’s research subjects, yet still provides a measure of anonymity and protection.  Is this method more effective than what Goldstein employed?  Does it all just depend on the situation?  Again, who makes the final call in this case, the subjects of the ethnographers/photographers?

There are, of course, ways of using photography that sidesteps these issues.  Places, events, and situations can be photographs in ways that capture details yet keep people relatively anonymous.  I have hundreds of images that are basically details, like this one:

I end up taking a lot of images similar to this, and I use them mostly as part of a note-taking process.  I use them to remember situations, conversations, and interactions.  Photographs–at least for me–are a really useful way to make visual reminders, and they are tremendously helpful for sparking my memory.  But images like this are only fragments, details of lives and moments rather than whole stories. And they certainly aren’t the kinds of images that appeal to people I have met and worked with during previous field experiences.  By far, what people appreciate and find the most fascinating are portraits–of family, friends, etc.  So I end up taking a lot of pictures of people, but I generally don’t circulate those images beyond the communities themselves.

This brings up another interesting issue.  My guess would be that Bourgois & Schonberg, along with Goldstein, gave their research participants copies of images they took while working in the field.  I do this all the time as well.  So there are some different levels of media production happening during fieldwork–this means that the publication of  a final ethnographic text is by no means the limit of media production that takes place during the ethnographic process.  There is a whole layer of informal image  production and exchange that occurs among ethnographers and the people they work with.  Long after anthropologists leave, these images will remain tucked away in notebooks, albums, drawers, and stored on digital devices.  Photographs are, as Elizabeth Edwards argues, all about “relationships made visible” (2006:33).  They are tangible reminders of interactions, agreements, conversations, and collaborations.  Photographs are definitely illustrative of the collaborations and long-term social relationships/bonds that are built between ethnographers and research participants.

But these bonds and relationships are not always all that prominent in final ethnographic texts.  So there is a kind of disconnect that occurs between actual fieldwork and the final publication of ethnographies–maybe because these texts are often written, edited, and produced far from field sites and research communities.  At this point, the question I have isn’t whether or not to take pictures of people that show their faces and reveal their identities–I do this all the time.  The question is when those faces should be included in final ethnographic publications, and when they should be left out.  Ethnographies are clearly produced for certain audiences–and they are not necessarily made for the research communities themselves.  We all know this.  This is, I think, one reason why ethnographers often decide to keep subjects hidden and anonymous.  Maybe.

However, if the production of photographs is the result of established agreements and relationships between ethnographers and participants, what gets lost when people are made anonymous in final publications?  Interestingly, while research communities are hidden and “protected,” the researchers themselves are prominently displayed and identified in final texts.  To me, there is something worth paying attention to here.  Ethnographies are supposed to be about the communities themselves (theoretically), but what purposes do they really serve?  If their pages are filled with nameless, faceless, hidden people, what do they have to do with the lives of the people who took the time to work with ethnographers?  I wonder, at this point, what a more collaborative ethnography would look like.  How would ethnographic texts look if they were designed–at least in part–to appeal to the needs and meanings of the research communities themselves?  Would participants choose to keep their identities hidden, or would they want to be prominently displayed–names, pictures and all–alongside the main “author” of the text?  Definitely something to think about.

References

Bourgois, Philippe and Jeffrey Schonberg
2009  Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Edwards, Elizabeth
2006  Photographs and the Sound of History. Visual Anthropology Review, Volume 21(1/2):27-46.

Goldstein, Donna
2003  Laughter out of Place: Race, Class, Violence and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown.

About a week later, as the scale of suffering in Japan became clearer, I became less concerned with everybody else’s questionable investments in the pain of others and more suspicious of my own hesitancy to engage emotionally.

Although I frowned and cried as solicited upon seeing the unavoidable photos of people staggering through muddy ruins, I wasn’t sure how to feel the rest of the time.  Brian Massumi’s claim that

“power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms—it’s affective”

suggests that stories and images circulate and infiltrate strategically. Even though, as de Certeau reminds us, readers aren’t fools and we employ tactics with which to play and navigate the web of discourse, we’re still stuck inside of it—and it inside of us.  Our critique of media, savvy avoidance of manipulation, and resistance to being told how to feel are themselves already the threads of discourses that have been woven into us.

Part of me wants to believe that some basic feeling for the suffering of others arises before all of this, that there’s a relational web prior and in excess to the discursive one—and that it’s woven more tightly.

But if the mass mediated means through which we gain access to others is always already shaping how we feel for those others, how can we feel without capitulating to the powers that traffic in affect? In the case of catastrophes, which seem to (fairly regularly) punctuate the passage of ordinary life with significance, how do we resist the meaning-making machines while still engaging meaningfully?

I’ll explore these questions here and in a series of posts to follow by looking into the ways various media structure our experiences of disaster and construe “eventfulness.” Considering the political and social interests at stake in Japan and the US, I’m curious about how this particular disaster is being positioned in historical time, and what such placements obscure, or displace.  But mostly, as I meditate on my own relationship with Japan and reaction to the unfolding news, I wonder how to engage responsibly with media and the “real” event.   Helpful to this project is Diana Taylor’s model of the witness who, reflecting Louis Althusser’s model of dialectic spectatorship and Augusto Boal’s “spect-actor”, serves as a

“guarantor of the link between the I and the you, the inside and the outside”and “accepts the dangers and responsibilities of seeing and of acting on what one has seen.”

This task is not easy considering how often we are bombarded with images and news of disaster.  People tell me that they either feel distant and numb to the repeating images, or else they connect to the images through identification: imagining the people in the images are one’s own mother, brother, etc.  The problem with the latter approach is that it brings the other into one’s own ideological universe and blinds one to the political, cultural, and other factors that structure the experience of the event.

These modes of spectatorship are not unlike those of hegemony and identification criticized by Althusser in relationship to theater.  However, when we are dealing with the theater of the real, and its tendency towards catastrophe, the ideological agendas organizing devastation into spectacle elicit modes of relating, as well as detaching, that register in the body.

Quoting the work of Hal Foster regarding shock and subjectivity in America, anthropologist Allen Feldman points to the double nature of the subject’s pleasure:

“in its guise as witness the mass subject reveals its sadomasochistic aspect, for this subject is split in relation to a disaster; even as he or she may mourn the victims, even identify with them masochistically, he or she may also be thrilled sadistically by the victims of whom he or she is not one.”

Feldman raises the stakes when he explicitly links the creation of the “mass subject” in modernity to catastrophe and the visual technologies through which the catastrophic is ideologically produced and distributed.  Developing a theory of the “actuarial gaze,” which he describes as

“the visual organization and institutionalization of threat perception and prophylaxis,” Feldman asserts that “the visual culture of risk reportage circulates catastrophic images as a psychosocial and, ultimately, political desire and currency.”

The visceral intensities ignited and snuffed in these visual images constitute the subjectivity from which we establish ourselves as a public, and how we, as a public, are going to relate or not.

I’d like to say that my reluctance to participate in the disaster drama stemmed solely from a refusal to let this awful thing give me any sort pleasure, masochistic or otherwise.  Or that I harbored sophisticated political suspicions of risk reportage.

But I was primarily loathe to identify with the community of spectators I imagined excitedly rallying their concern on the receiving end of the mediated image.  It was the thrill of the social—the heightened sense of occasion—that I couldn’t stand.  Nothing, it seemed, would make me feel so far away, so alienated from the thing in itself than positioning myself from this A-frame cottage in Iowa somewhere inside the Big Deal Event.  As for approaching the thing in itself, I knew of no other means than those used by the community of spectators themselves: disaster footage.  But did I really want to go there?  As elaborated by Zizek, the “passion for penetrating the Real Thing” spirals into an increasingly violent pursuit of the Real within the images that structure our reality.  I did not want to experience the tsunami as the “thrill of the Real,” the ultimate special effect.

An internet search brought me to a video of the tsunami swallowing the coastal town of Kuji where I had stayed with a family nearly 10 years ago.   The dreadful thrill of the footage did indeed flood my body darkly, excessively, like the tsunami itself.  Feeling my own footing give way, despite sitting down, I braced myself.  Had someone been next to me, however, I would have reached out to them, without thinking, to steady myself.

I wonder now about that instinct.  Why, when something awful or awesome is about to happen, or has just happened, do we tend to grab on to the people next to us?  Surely, the support sought by such a gesture isn’t merely that of balance, but of affiliation.   I hadn’t wanted to get on the drama bandwagon, but here I was: wanting to connect.

The public I imagined gaping from a safe distance was probably not the public into which my friend had been calling me when she sent me that facebook message.   Rather than use the event to elevate the drama in our lives, she may have been reaching out to me in order to ground the drama in a shared reality. This is not to say she was trying to reduce the significance of the event; the ordinary world has its own sort of eventfulness.  As Kathleen Stewart describes it,

“modes of attending to scenes and events spawn socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states and public feelings of all kinds.”

The everyday eventfulness “resonating in bodies, scenes, and forms of sociality,” spreads in whispers and flourishes in indeterminacy.  Something is happening, is going to happen, to us.  The mode is one of suspension that fastens potential significance onto the tiniest of things.  The effect isn’t of elevating reality into ungraspable proportions, but of charging reality with limitless points of connection.

While the looming risk perception propagated in the “actuarial gaze” may make and mask the ways in which we always feel vulnerable to invisible, ever-present and threatening powers, maybe it fails to displace the ways we feel vulnerable to each other.   The witness, unlike the spectator, creates a zone of proximity in the “link between the I and the you”.   Amidst the spectacular scenes of ruin, my old friend took the risk of writing me after all this time, took the risk of hearing bad news and having to respond, and took the risk of being criticized or blogged about.  In doing so she offered me the first clue for thinking about mediated models for responsible action.

We spend a lot of time talking about ethnography as a product, and even about the ethical issues involved in “shared anthropology,” but it is almost impossible to teach someone how to gain the trust of their research subjects. There is no one-size-fits-all approach because the obstacles to gaining such consent will vary from project to project. While I can’t offer pre-packaged solutions, I can advise students how to handle such obstacles without giving up. Patience and persistence are skills which many students have yet to learn. There are also techniques they can use in the filmmaking process to work around limitations placed on them by their subjects. There is a tremendous wealth of ethnographic knowledge to be gained from working through these obstacles.

One of my students this semester wants to work with a local hearing impaired community. We were both surprised to learn that the members of this community lack the necessary Chinese literacy to be able to read and understand a consent form. It turns out that this is not too uncommon. A 1997 study of 17-18 year old deaf students in the United States found that median reading comprehension was at a fourth grade level. For someone who communicates in Sign Language, learning to read English involves the added burden of learning English, so it comes as no surprise that gaining English literacy poses serious obstacles. What is surprising, at least to me, is that the education system so miserably fails these students by not providing the tools they need to overcome these obstacles. It is too early for me to say anything definitive, but it sounds like similar problems face the hearing impaired in Taiwan. (Here are links to two recent studies about the subject [both are PDFs]: “A Survey of Sign Language in Taiwan” and “Taiwan Sign Language Research: An Historical Overview“)

In this case, the solution is fairly simple: I will have my student record someone signing the consent form, and he will play it for his subjects. He will then video-tape their consent. In some cases, however, things have gotten much more complicated. One semester a student filmed a class of special-needs students and only had consent to show the backs of their heads. Since the young students moved around quite a bit, it made for some very interesting editing!

It is also something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit, having just submitted a paper for review which discusses how we dealt with consent issues in our film, Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! I will save a fuller discussion of the issues we faced for later, but the way we solved the problem was to take a page out of Jean Rouch and to film the discussions about consent and include them as an element in the film. It turned out to be a very revealing and powerful scene!

Some people argue that anthropology needs to be better written so that it can be more accessible to the general public — this is part of a general sense that anthropologists write in ‘jargon’. I am not particularly happy with this critique of anthropology as ‘jargon’. First, I agree that anthropologists need to write clearly and beautifully and without unnecessary jargon — but this is just to say that many academics are atrocious writers whose style we put up with because we are interested in the content of what we are saying. The most successful academics are those who write clearly and accessibly: the Benedicts and Geertz’s of the world. So it is not just the pubic that deserves some clear writing. (and please note what a kind thing I’ve just said about Geertz’s style!)

That said, I’m often struck by the way people believe anthropologists use jargon ‘unnecessarily’ while they rarely complain about the technical prose of geophysicists or molecular biologists. Granted, some would denounce geophysicists and anthropologists in the name of a thorough-going anti-intellectualism. But for most people the distinction seems to be that geophysicists ‘know something’ while anthropologists simply do not, and therefore hide the relatively common-sense nature of their knowledge in ‘jargon’. This I have less time for.

Beyond some basic stylistic issues there is a deeper question of what genres anthropologists write in. At times it seems like some people (Eric Lassiter I’m looking at you) would argue that all of our output as anthropologists should be written for the communities we work with and, contrariwise, that only way to treat our collaborators in the field is to do our best to turn them into anthropologists like us — a fate that, frankly, I wouldn’t wish on a lot of people.

Am I wrong in thinking that this sort of approach restricts the genres in which anthropologists can write to a very narrow band? And, ironically, when taken to an extreme such an approach could result in the situation which we have now, but in reverse: anthropologists who feel compelled to write only accessible pieces for a general public. Is this the future want? I am genuinely uncertain what most people’s answer would be. Votes for ‘yes’ seem to give up anthropology’s claim to specialist knowledge that requires training and expertise — or, as they might say, perhaps they are just coming clean on what a pipe dream that is. They also seem to be unconcerned with the idea that anthropologists can and should write in several genres, each of which appeal to different audiences.

Let’s return to the jargon issue. I often have students who complain that they must write ‘in jargon’ in order to be taken seriously. Often times, these students mistake obfuscation for alternate genre standards. What is ‘jargon’ on some occasions in ‘beauty’ to others. Need I remind one here of Lévi-Strauss?

So: is it ethical in principle to say things about people that they cannot understand (technical work) or that is written in a genre they don’t care for or ‘get’ (disciplinarily-defined beauty)? Beyond the obvious answers — that we should not only write in these ways, or that there are pragmatic lengths we must go to to make sure people do not misunderstand what we are saying in these specialized works and get made at us — this is a question that anthropologists have not answered. At least as far as I can tell.

My feeling is that the answer is yes, it is ethical in principle. In practice, of course, there are power dynamics, limited time to produce in many genres, and a variety of other factors that shape how we think about our work and our relationship with members of the lifeworlds we describe. But in principle? I think the answer is no yes. But I’d be interested in hearing what others think.