Today I was thinking about arrivals, and how all anthropologists love to tell their arrival stories.  We like certain kinds of stories, and we like to write about them and compare them like treasured little baseball cards.  Ok, I do it too.  We start off in place A with all sorts of plans, ideas, theories, methods, and hopes…and then we find some way to get to place B, take stock, and see what’s really possible given limited money, sanity, and time.  Leaving one place and entering another–especially with the strange, self-imposed  job of “doing research”–has all sorts of jarring effects.  Some places more than others.  We deal with these transitions, I think, through some of the stories we tell.  Whenever we get the chance to tell them, of course.  Sometimes it takes a while to find a pay phone, or a friend, or a high speed wireless signal so we can get the stories out of our heads.  Anyway, here’s a classic arrival scene:

Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight (Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1961[1922]:4).

A Malinowskian classic.  My version would go something like this:

Imagine yourself, fresh off a two-hour Alaska Airlines flight out of LAX, surrounded by all of your gear in the airport at San Jose del Cabo, Mexico waiting for the customs light to (hopefully) flash green, while the precious funds in your student loan dependent bank account seem to sail away, second by second, out of sight.

I think that sums it up.  The light was green, by the way.

So, here’s the update.  I have been down in the field for about a month and a half.  I think I am getting through the “settling in” phase and progressing to the “I really need to get this shit done” phase.  Everyone experiences these phases differently, of course.  One thing that happens to me during fieldwork is that I always think that I need to be doing MORE.  But then when I look at what I have done–tons of notes, interviews, lots of good contacts, and so on–and I realize I am doing pretty well.  Things are coming along.  So I am always tacking back and forth between pushing myself to get out and do more, and telling myself to relax and let certain things happen as they may.  Life doesn’t exactly pan out according to some ethnographically convenient schedule, after all.

What’s rule #1 of the early stages of fieldwork?  Go outside.  Right?  I think there is a tendency for many folks to do a sort of social retreat when they first get into the field.  I tend to do this a bit, and I think it’s pretty normal.  The thing about doing anthropological fieldwork is that once you go outside, you always feel like you’re working.  It’s kind of a strange feeling, at least for me.  Every step outside can feel like you’re punching the Boasian time-clock, and you have to be ready for any and every possible anthropological detail.  It can wear you down.  I think that’s why it’s pretty appealing to want to hide away in novels, or ethnographies, or dubbed movies at the local cinema (for example).  So, rule number one is GO OUTSIDE, because that’s where life is really taking place.  But rule number two, at least for me, is find some ways to turn things off and have a little balance as well.  We need to stay sane, you know.

In other news, interviews are coming along too.  A little slower than I’d wanted, but things are picking up.  There is always a difference between people saying they are willing to do an interview and actually getting the interview scheduled.  At least that’s the case for me.  The second part is by far the hardest, and I am always relieved when I finally get to push the button on the digital recorder and get another interview on the proverbial books.  And speaking of interviews, the more than you do them, the more comfortable they become.  I still kind of think that interviews are pretty strange social situations–asking someone to sit down and talk about a certain set of themes or questions while you run some weird recording device?  Who does that?  Charles Briggs wrote about the strangeness of the interview context, and he was right on the mark.  But, we all get used to them, and we get better at doing them.

The process gets easier, more relaxed, and I think the conversations start to flow a little better too.  When I was doing my M.A. work I used to get all stressed out about the moment when I asked someone if it was OK for me to actually record the interview.  It can be a delicate thing, you know, how you bring up THAT question.  But everyone finds their way.  How do I do it?  I like to have the recorder out early, so people know it’s there.  That’s better, in my experience, than keeping it out of sight and then pulling it on them like a gun at the last moment.  Good god what is THAT?  It’s can actually be pretty intimidating to be interviewed, so it’s good to make things as comfortable as possible.  I think we need to keep these things in mind.  For me, I like to put the recorder out on the table in plain view, during the pre-interview small talk and chit chat, and let people get used to it.  Then, ask them if they’re OK with recording.  And usually, people are fine with it.  If not, it’s no big deal, just take notes in a notebook and roll with it.  I’d be interested to know how other people handle this particular key moment in the interview process, though.  What’s YOUR technique?

So, a few questions about field notes:  I’m interested to know how different people actually do their field notes.  Do you write all throughout the day?  Do you write every day?  At night?  Do you jot little things in books?  Or do you have a photographic memory?  Do you write NOTHING and plan to remember it all when you write your masterpiece dissertation?  Any favorite types of notebooks that you REALLY NEED TO HAVE to do the anthropology note taking thing?  Sorry for all the questions.  My ever-evolving technique involves jotted reminders in a small book (or sometimes any available scrap piece of paper) and then expanded notes once I get to the computer.  I write most days, but not everyday.  Michael Agar had some really good advice about writing field notes that I really liked: don’t try to record everything under the sun, try to focus things a bit.  For me, it makes some sense.  Some folks have this idea that ethnographers should be writing so many notes that it leaves little time for actually getting out and seeing what’s going on.  What’s the purpose of writing for 8 hours and missing everything that’s going down all around you?  So, once again: balance.

Last but not least.  What I really like about blogging are all the conversations, links, and connections that can take place.  The conversations that happen in blogging are really interesting because they can happen in a pretty direct manner–like when people comment on specific posts–or they can be indirect.  By that I mean that one person can post something in one place, and someone can take something from there and start another little conversational fire in another place.  Sometimes those dispersed little fires get linked up, sometimes they don’t.  But they’re out there, and I think it’s pretty fascinating.  Well, I just got a comment on the post I wrote a while back about bringing books into the field.  The comment is from Hannah, an anthropologist/ethnographer  from the University of Liverpool who is doing her dissertation work in Columbia.  She recently wrote a post that replies to the question I asked at the end of my post.   The question I asked: “If you are planning on heading out to do fieldwork, what books do you have in mind?  Are you bringing the classics?  Only the latest methods texts and ethnographies?  Or, on the flip side of all this, are you some techie hipster who has gone entirely digital, thereby completely eliminating this whole issue?”  Her reply:

Am I a techie hipster? Hmmmm. I have an iPad and solar charger (not much electricity in the Northern Guajira) which has been loaded with Murakami’s 1Q84, Kristof and WuDunn’s Half the sky, Thomas’ The end of Mr. Y, Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, and now Emerson’s Writing Ethnographic fieldnotes (as well as a series of mountaineering texts and pdfs on community media). But I am also taking a bound photocopy of a Colombian friend’s fieldnotes and a tattered and annotated copy of Guber’s La etnografía from his original fieldwork. I’m not taking Proust. I know myself too well, I would get lost and would not have Aomame‘s ability to only read twenty pages a day.

An iPad with a solar charger?  Now I feel low tech with my beat up four year old Macbook.  Check out the rest of her post–it’s a good one.  Interestingly, I happen to have a copy of Kingsolver’s Lacuna as well…it’s right next to Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  Do I have too many books?  Well, I think that was well established in my previous post on the topic.  Hannah even gives me some grief about my book addiction problem when she comments on my essential book list: “His final (?) list was heavy on the textbook/methods guide side and I must admit that it brought to mind the stories of Claude Levi-Strauss’ entourage making their way across Brasil whilst laden down with, well, everything.”  Ha!  I think she’s onto something.  I need to travel lighter.  One of my friends here joked with me that I have so many books on my table that they are blocking all of the sunlight from outside.  Ok, so it’s a problem.  I’ll work on it, I promise.

Anyway, I think the chance connections and conversations that are floating around out there are pretty amazing.  That’s why this whole anthropology blogging thing is pretty cool.  Vast networks of conversations pulsing on various continents.  Often, with people who haven’t “really met” in the supposed real world.  It’s cool–and it’s definitely different from the days of Malinowski, where people stayed connected through sonic dispatches and little handwritten or typed up papers, stuffed into envelopes, that had to literally be “shipped” from one place to another.  But then, I do realize that not everyone has a connection to wireless internet in the field these days, unlike some people.  The world is anything but flat, no matter what Tom Friedman says.  It’s an uneven geography, no doubt.  The internet may be far reaching, and full of potential, but it ain’t everywhere–and that includes places all around here where I am doing research.  It’s sporadic at best, and coverage is certainly tied in with larger social and political currents and conflicts.  But you already knew that, didn’t you?  Well, it’s part of the overall story that I am here trying to track down.  More about that later.

End of transmission.

PS: At the end of her post, Hannah asks for more suggestions about reading material.  If you have ideas, send em her way.

If you don’t already know, I will tell you again: my fieldwork is about tourism development.  I am looking at what happens when the massive global process that is international tourism development edges its way into new territories.  Let’s not pretend that it is a faceless process, however.  Individuals move the development juggernaut along with the smallest of daily actions and decisions.  They also stand in its way, mind you–nothing is completely inevitable.  There have been many changes to this place, especially in the last 10-15 years.  A network of barbed wire fences and “no-trespassing” signs cut across the landscape and speak to the nature of those changes.  Things weren’t always this way, though.  When it became increasingly apparent around the 1970s that tourism had tremendous potential, the government made sure to survey, map, and place proper boundaries on the landscape.  The boundaries eventually became fences, which now mark particularized, alienable, and marketable bits of geographic space.  Interesting, the different ways that people think about and arrange space, no?

My research is about people, of course, but also about a particular place.  This place is a stretch of land located between two communities that are deeply divided about what “development” should mean for this region.  Some want the jobs promised by tourism developers and local officials.  Others, fearful of severe environmental degradation, call for conservation and “sustainable” development.  Many people fall somewhere between those two positions.  So yes, I am exploring the stories of people, which happen to be intricately connected with the histories of a particular place.  This strip of land has an endless array of histories and meanings for people around here.  But the histories extend even further back, as those shells and rocks easing their way down the ridge line of that coastal cliff quietly attest.

My point: archaeology matters.  When it comes to trying to understand the meaning(s) of this place, for me the importance of archaeology is unmistakable–even if I am unsure how I am going to incorporate it into my overall research framework.  Maybe this is my four-field training showing through.  No doubt, it is.  But when I hear people debating about the meanings of this landscape, these weathered, little known sites all along the coast often come to mind.  Coastal hunter-gatherer sites don’t exactly get a lot of press, if you know what I mean.  Most people, in fact, probably wouldn’t notice them even if they walked right past them.  But they carry meaning, just as giant rock art panels in San Ignacio or pyramids on the Yucatan peninsula do.  A key difference, of course, is that tourism sites tend to be constructed around things like pyramids, yet literally placed over hunter-gatherer sites.  That’s one way of making the landscape into a blank page, and in some ways it’s inevitable.  Right?  Land goes through different cycles of human use, after all.  Still, when the backhoes come sweeping through to clear the landscape, important layers of meaning are literally stripped away.  It happens here, in Los Angeles, and all around the world for that matter.  The past gives way to the present, however reluctantly.  And, when I hear another real estate agent touting the investment potential of the “untouched” landscape around these parts, I know the process of effacement is well under way, and the next cycle of human use is just around the corner.  Five star hotels, airports, you name it.  Well, maybe.  That depends.  Same place, different human pursuits.  It’s a long story.

It is widely acknowledged that Habermas idealizes the era of 18^th century bourgeois Europeans inhabiting markets and coffee houses deliberatively dialoguing on the future of the nation, markets, religion, and the species. Those halcyonic days quickly gave way to our present situation where the public sphere is colonized by corporate media, where our dynamic and eventful two-way chatter about the fate of the planet is replaced by the one-way monologue from the culture industries. This is our present day inheritance, and, according to Habermas, all networked communication technologies are tools of capital propaganda. Yes, the notion of the public sphere is monolithic and universalizing; ignores counter-publics of gender, ethnic, and class minorities; and has little to say about the specific affordances of contemporary networked communication technologies. The ‘political sphere’ should certainly be a plurality of spheres and publics.

One thing Habermas did get absolutely right was that in the context formed at the confluence of culture, power, technology, and the public sphere there is a historical transformation from open to closed systems, to borrow a perhaps reductive idea from internet scholar Tim Wu. I want to discuss three cases in regards to the two stages of the public sphere. I will conclude by attempting to show how future theorization of the public sphere and of social movements need to consider the media ecologies that consist of social media, cable television, hacktivism, and grassroots activists sleeping in solidarity in city parks.

Habermas uses the unfortunate term bourgeois to describe the class of the people in his ideal public sphere.  Occupy and Anonymous both would likely detest this term to describe the methods of their political action, but Habermas saw the bourgeois against the specter of feudalism and monarchism. To him, the bourgeois were a uniquely liberated people, who braved ostracism to speak freely. If we must discuss Occupy and Anonymous in Habermas’s terms we might do well to think of these “bourgeois” activists resisting corporate feudalism. In a fascinating interview ending with him walking off stage right, Occupy activist and journalist Chris Hedges describes the financial “criminal class” as involved in “neofeudalism.” His is such an excellent example of cable television functioning, against Habermas’s dystopic views, as a public sphere that I typed it out for you:

Those who are protesting the rise of the corporate state are in fact on the political spectrum the true conservatives because they are calling for the restoration of the rule of law. The radicals have seized power and they have trashed all regulations and legal impediments to a reconfiguration of American society into a form of neofeudalism.

Habermas use the term “refeudalization” to describe how the public sphere was colonized by corporate propaganda. The point is that Occupy is an attempt to defeudalize what remains of the middle and working classes through modeling a laterally-organized direct democracy in their General Assembly. Here is an excellent video of the General Assembly using its structure to discuss the role of hierarchy in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

An article describes anthropologist David Graeber’s work at Occupy establishing the horizontal General Assembly as opposed to the vertically organized leader-based organization:

A ‘general assembly’ means something specific and special to an anarchist. In a way, it’s the central concept of contemporary anarchist activism, which is premised on the idea that revolutionary movements relying on coercion of any kind only result in repressive societies.

A “GA” is a carefully facilitated group discussion through which decisions are made — not by a few leaders, or even by majority rule, but by consensus. Unresolved questions are referred to working groups within the assembly, but eventually everyone has to agree, even in assemblies that swell into the thousands.

Occupy’s General Assembly is not unlike how Anonymous and LulzSec make their decisions on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) systems. The IRC process is a bit more chaotic but similar to the GA in that both are laterally organized, allowing for leaderless deliberation and action. Direct democracy is a messy practice; one that has confounded mainstream consolidated news media looking for a dominant agenda. But as we shout in the streets: “This is what democracy looks like!” (I am one who believes there is a single issue perfectly described in the included photo above I took at Occupy LA.)

The question on many media pundits’ lips as well as those keyed in to Habermas’s revelation regarding the historical transformation of the public sphere is: when will this open, deliberative public sphere of Occupy’s General Assembly or Anonymous’s IRC space of praxis give in to formalization and consolidation? Perhaps the techno-structure of the GA or the IRC prohibits such integration and institutionalization, or perhaps the power of persuasive culture assists participants in resisting leadership and agenda aggregation. I don’t know but I will provide an example of an open, laterally organized corporate public sphere giving way to a non-participatory, top-down corporate public sphere. Yet, despite this, and in counter-distinction to Habermas, I argue, a public sphere perseveres in this example from Current.

The progressive and independent television news network Current originally was founded on the idea of media democratization which they attempted to achieve through creating a lateral network of documentary video producers (Viewer-created content producers or VC2) working through the central hub of Current as a television network that showcased the work, a social media destination current.com used to discuss the documentaries, and a corporation incentivizing participation through payment. While enmeshed within a for-profit media system, Current saw itself as a formal critique of consolidation and the “refeudalization” of the public sphere. Indeed, the network’s chairman, Al Gore was apt to quote Habermas in his book Assault on Reason.

But by 2011, this specific media democratization project was over at Current, replaced by pundit-based, ratings driven news programming led by the return of Keith Olbermann to cable television news. Now it might be convenient to criticize this transformation of the deliberative bourgeois public sphere of the VC2 model to the for-profit refeudalization of what was once a vibrant public sphere. But a wider look at the role played by Olbermann and progressive media punditry exhibits how various elements work in consort to produce the educative conditions for the public sphere. What remains under-theorized and documented in both Habermas and in regards to the social movements of the present, are the ecological dynamics between various constituencies that produce the conditions for a progressive public sphere. I call upon the General Assembly of Occupy Research to empirically document the Occupy movement within its cultural context that includes hacktivists, television newscasters, as well as boots-on-the-ground Occupiers.

For most of us too busy (in our non-market activities) to be sleeping at the various liberation parks around the nation and globe, we know the Occupy Movement as #occupywallstreet, or #occupyla. It is something we know less through the experience of inhabiting a space in protest but more as something known through sitting at home and engaging with social media. For others, we know the Occupy Movement through cable television news–Fox, MSNBC, CNN, or Current. Cable television is a networked communication technology with specific cultures of consumption. Unlike those reading about Occupy through Twitter and its hashtag #occupywallstreet, cable news viewers have few options of engaging with the material through the media itself. Habermas, who correctly prioritizes two-way, dialogic engagement over top-down listening, thinks this form of political mediation expressed by cable news is part of the problem of democracy—passivity and propaganda.

Again, Habermas misses the point of active cultures of consumption and how information can lead to action. For instance, Cenk Uygar of the Young Turks, and formerly of MSNBC, announced in Zuccotti Park the political action committee (PAC) he is forming, Wolf-PAC, with a sole focus of getting a 28th US Constitutional Amendment limiting personhood to people not corporations. Via YouTube and soon via his up-and-coming cable TV program on Current he will continue to encourage political action. While scholars have wondered if the rich dialogue that occurs in the public sphere ever actually leads to democratic action, mainstream cable television, despite lacking two-way engagement, exhibits the conditions of an attenuated public sphere by encouraging political action.

What is the cause for these emergent horizontal organizations? Yochai Benkler, in his new book, claims that humans are essentially selfless and collaborative; the open architecture of the internet is just helping that gene to express itself. It’s a provocative argument he makes with quite a bit of social, psychological, and biological anthropological data. Perhaps, but the point is that horizontal organizations exist as temporal and transitional boundary objects impacted by technology, power, and culture from all directions. Likewise, power, culture, and technology are mediated by forces within the media ecology, some of these forces are laterally while others are vertically ordered—this is the mediated context for the present social movements.

It is corny to admit it but what I discovered was a worldview and mode of political action that aligned with my own belief system as a person and an anthropologist. The core concept of progressivism is progress–that culture changes through time because of the actions of vision-driven groups and individuals. Now, how much agency individuals actually have to enact cultural change is a hotly debated topic in both political and academic circles but few disagree that “a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has” as it was that activist anthropologist, Margaret Mead, who said that most famous of hummus container quotes.

Progressive philosophy is aligned with the base theory of cultural anthropology, that is: culture is not a static or conservative thing that we need to stabilize at some nostalgic and unrealistic moment but rather a dynamic process. Progressives want to direct that process towards a more inclusive future. Progressives are not hung-up on retaining or reverting to an antique sense of ethnic, gendered, or national purity. They don’t romanticize some false sense of the securities of 1950s Americana. However, as I will describe below, The American Dream as a concept was a focal point for progressives at Netroots Nation this year.

Although in the preceding years Netroots Nation events have attracted Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and other stalwarts of the Democratic Party, the perspective one gets from Free Speech TV’s makeshift studio in the lobby of the conference is one in which the Democratic Party is centrist, more aligned with the corporate and Republican agenda, more beholden to Washington lobbyists, more entrenched in political melodrama than progressives who though technologically savvy, informed, and vocal are true outsiders. True there is the Congressional Progressive Caucus, with but one Senator, Bernie Sanders (VT), and 70 or so representatives, the impression of progressives from Netroots is something closer to the ground and grass than the overpasses of the Beltway. Here, real issues are addressed: economic justice, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the Patriot Act, resistance to corporate consolidation of the media, the elimination of all types of discrimination, the end of troop deployments to the Middle East, and healing the relationship between energy independence and ecology security. Progressives believe in labor unions and environmental justice over corporate profits; equality in free speech and education; and valuing the dignity of all human beings over corporations as human beings.

As progressives are rarely represented in Congress they are a grassroots movement, hence the “roots” of Netroots Nation. But what about the “Net”? The progressive brand “Netroots,” a conflation of internet and grassroots, describes a politically coordinated and technology-enabled public. It can be considered synonymous with the progressive blogosphere, the internet-activated public sphere. Netroots express the value of technoprogressivism—an idealization of the positive role of technology in achieving progressive political objectives that has its historic roots in 1960s computer and countercultural notions of techno-cultural change. Netroots activists believe in the power of networked technologies to bring together people in a space of reasoned, passionate public discourse that can lead to coordinated social change. Because of the element of disenfranchisement experienced by progressives, the internet and cable television outlets like Free Speech TV constitute the technological grounds for community and cultural change.

Despite progressive’s resistance to the neverlands of Americana and Manifest Destiny they were openly engaging in a rebranding exercise of that most debatable of notions from our history–the American Dream. In probably the most thrilling talk of the conference, Van Jones, Obama’s onetime green jobs czar who was hunted down by the right wing noise machine until he was forced to resign, re-introduced the slogan “Rebuild the Dream,” that is, the American Dream:

“I’m not talking about killing the American Fantasy, okay? The American Fantasy: everybody’s gonna be rich, you buy a lot of things, you’ll be happy? No, that’s an American Fantasy, which means it’s the American nightmare. That needs to go. We don’t believe in that at all. … I’m talking about something much, much deeper than that. Something that we had in this country until the commercializers turned it into something else.”

Bolding railing against the false happiness of consumer capitalism–a cornerstone of economic liberalism–otherwise known as the US global economy, Jones goes onto a working class definition of the American Dream he wants to rebuild, that you should be able to:

“walk out your front door, go to a dignified job, put in a good day’s work and come back home with a paycheck that you can feed your family with and give your children a better life.”

Jones finished his speech by accusing the “Dream killers…who have a wrecking ball agenda for our country. A wrecking ball for America. But they painted that wrecking ball red, white and blue.” The wrecking ball must certainly refer to the Tea Party ideology of rampant deregulation that is attempting to dismantle the governmental safety nets for poor, undereducated, unemployed, and uninsured citizens. On the grounds of the razed governmental buildings, “cheap patriots’” third and forth townhouses are being built.

He concludes by defining the “deep patriots” versus the “cheap patriots” which he aligns with the Dream Killers and their American Fantasy:

“It’s time for the deep patriots who love this country and who love everybody in this country, no matter what color you are or who you want to marry or what kind of piercing you got in your nose, we love everybody, we are the deep patriots.”

This big nondiscriminatory platform, furnished with the rhetorical weapons of progressive patriotism, and wielding the decentralized networking capacities of the internet gives me pause still coming down for the firework parties of Independence Day 2011. We could do worse, as anthropologists or activists, than thinking about what tools–both rhetorical and technical—are needed to activate agency in future world-building.

—

Following Rex’s and ckelty’s trend I present this light ethnographic account of progressive patriotism and liberty from a recent bit of fieldwork with freedom loving digital activists. This post will also appear in Free Speech TV’s monthly email to subscribers.

Please give her a Savage welcome!

This is how others describe her:

A third year graduate student in Cultural Anthropology, Eleanor came to the University of Iowa with an M. Div from Union Theological Seminary in New York.  Before landing in Iowa with her two cats, Eleanor worked a variety of non-profit jobs from facilitating social justice seminars at the Church Center for the United Nations to assisting elderly New York and displaced New Orleans jazz musicians through the Jazz Foundation of America.   Eleanor’s interests are diverse, but she continually returns to issues of ethnographic representation, technology, desire, the (gendered, racialized, sexualized) body, and new formulations of personhood and “life”. After writing her Master’s paper on voice, language ideology, and early film narration in Japan, Eleanor continues to explore the effects of new technological forms in Japan.  For her dissertation research she will be looking into the relationships, subjectivities and affects created between humans and machines, and the ethical implications of such encounters.

Free Speech TV at the National Conference on Media Reform

From its inception in 1995, Free Speech TV’s goal has been to infiltrate and subvert the vapid, shrill and corporately controlled American television newscape with challenging and unheard voices. Fast forward to 2011, and in the age of viral videos, social media and ubiquitous computing, the same issues persist.

An excellent young pro-freedom-of-speech organization, Free Press, called all media activists to Boston for the National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR), April 8-10, to celebrate independent media and incubate strategies to fight the tide of corporate personhood, monopolization in communication industries, and the denial of access to the public airwaves.

These are issues FSTV has long fought, first with VHS tapes of radical documentaries shipped to community access stations throughout the nation, then through satellite carriage in 30 million homes, and now via live internet video and direct dialogues with the audience through social media.

FSTV was at NCMR in full force, covering live panels on everything from the role of social media in North African revolutions to media’s sexualization of women; developing strategic relationships with print, radio, internet and television collaborators; interviewing luminaries like FCC Commissioner Copps; and inspiring the delegates by opening up the otherwise closed and corporatized satellite television world to the voices of media activists fighting for access and diversity during a frankly terrifying period in American media freedom.

One question haunted the many stages, daises and dialogues at the NCMR: Is the open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet – by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized – becoming closed, centralized and homogenous as it begins to look and feel more like the elite-controlled cable television system?

For example, while we were in the conference, the House voted to block the FCC from protecting our right to access an open Internet. The mergers of Comcast and NBC-Universal and AT&T/T-Mobile loomed behind every passionate oration. And yet FSTV was there to document when FCC Commissioner Copps took the stage stating he would resist the denial of network neutrality and such monopolizing mergers.

Internationally, examples of the power and problems of the internet exist. The Egypt-based Facebook group “We are all Khaled Said” had 80,000 members, many who amassed at Tahrir Square on January 26, instigating a wave of democratization that began in Tunisia – also fueled by social media – and hopefully continuing to Libya. Two days later, however, the Mubarak regime was able effectively to hit a “kill switch” on the internet and target activists using Facebook for arrest, an activity that worked against the desires of the repressive regime. At the NCMR, Democracy Now! reporter Sharif Abdel Kouddous said,  “Facebook was down … so they hit the streets. It had the reverse desire and effect that the government wanted to happen.”

In 2010, Reporters Without Borders compiled a list of 13 internet enemies – countries that suppress free speech online. The U.S. wasn’t on the list, but U.S. companies Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and Apple were pressured to cut digital and financial support for whistleblowing WikiLeaks. The point is obvious: A vigilant press aided by an open, uncensored and unprivatized internet are necessary yet threatened and are the focus of FSTV’s coverage at NCMR.

FSTV embodies that ancient movement of ordinary people taking back power from entrenched elites. Today, every issue, from class inequality to ecological justice – is a media issue. However, our media sources, from journalists to internet and television delivery systems, are being co-opted by monopolizing corporations and lobbyists. As an independent, open and interactive television network, FSTV is an antidote to the problems facing free speech and democracy as more media power is centralized in fewer hands. Thankfully, as we found out in Boston, FSTV is not alone in this dangerous and difficult operation of media liberation.

—
Jenkins hyperbolically describes “critical pessimists” as people who “opt out of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading only books published on recycled paper by small alternative presses”. This is a false exaggeration of a movement that is providing a necessary check on corporate power and mindfully working for greater civic, community, and citizen involvement in media production.

The last morning of a national conference on progressive media one of my friendly informants invited me to a power breakfast at 8 AM at a 4 star hotel. An HD camera rested on a high tripod above two semi-private tables overlooking the harbor via tall glass windows that shed morning light on flutes of parfait and silver pitchers of coffee. Having a rather late night at the cash bar at the local whiskey establishment we hungrily consumed our breakfast, caffeine, and juice as we awaited our invitation to introduce ourselves. Magazine editors, television producers, community media activists, major funders, radio DJs, progressive television personalities, and one out-of-place anthropologist quickly gave their name in an audible wave around the tables.

The editor emeritus of a major progressive magazine presented two timely issues that were cause for celebration and alarm. He wanted to celebrate a success that needed repeating. For that we needed to generate an institutional history of the practices that worked. A small committee was formed through a show of hands. As the house social scientist it sounded like that fit my skill set so I volunteered. I was encouraged to visit the archive of programmatic and pragmatic emails that went quickly and passionately between the groups and individuals hustling to organize leading up to the days of the successful operation. Next, there was not as much agreement, as can be expected, about what to do about the alarming new situation but engaged debated ensued about fundraising, the upcoming 2012 election, and ever increasing media consolidation around corporate mergers. We agreed to collaborate. But what did collaboration mean?

Thinking through this question and about Part.Public.Part.Lab‘s work in the article Birds, I began to typologize social interaction into three types: participation, collaboration, and mergers. First is participation, which was the focus of Birds, and can originate from an organized public or be provoked by a formal social organization. When participation emerges, it can come from three different categories descending in the amount of time and resource commitment, as media scholar Mirko Tobias Schäfer explains in his excellent 2011 book, Bastard Culture! How Participation Transforms Cultural Production. The first, according to Schäfer is modification—the hacking of physical devices such as Xboxs or software. The second is a form of explicit participation, where subject exert agency and act on an ambition for professional or personal growth. Examples of explicit participation include the now classic forms of user-generated content production: making YouTube videos, Facebook profiles, and Tweets. And, thirdly, is implicit participation, the subjectively lackadaisical or algorithmically automated forms of participation such as “liking” this or that, or simply conducting Google searches that implicitly participate with Google’s capacity to fine tune and target its search and advertising machinery. Each of these three forms of participation—modification, and explicit and implicit participation, are vertically organized between an organized public and a formal enterprise. For example, my co-diners this morning—magazine editors, television audience experts, social justice social media gurus—each incorporate the network and economic effects of at least two of these forms of participation into their annual planning and budgeting. The vertical power relation of this participation distinguishes it from what I define as collaboration—which is horizontally ordered. Modifiers and hackers take professional objects and manipulate them for more idiosyncratic and local uses; explicit UGC contributors upload content to billionaire companies; and implicit participants do the same, but often out of ignorance or lack of concern.

Second in my typology is collaboration, which my little story above demonstrates, and is usually the tool for the under-funded and those organized to work for social justice. Collaboration is a middle-range theory, between unincorporated or uninterested participation, and fully incorporated and economically motivated mergers. Collaboration is a powerful tactic to resist hegemonic power, and thus codes an antagonistic relationship to vertically arranged power structures–while at the same time resisting the temporal transformation into hierarchy–but it is structurally a horizontally ordered strategy for internal practical formation. The lateral pooling of resources—sometimes with potential competitors as I saw at the power breakfast–proves that, in the social justice realm, the efficacy of the mission trumps the funding operation (sometimes to the point of compromising the efficacy). Despite the fact that many of these organizations compete for a decreasing share of philanthropic dollars, what was agreed upon was a commitment to collaborate, pool resources, and attack the problem vigorously from the skills sets dispersed throughout the group. New media firms also exhibit collaborative strategies as anthropologist Thomas Malaby showed in his study of collective problem solving and virtual world coding in Second Life. But while the visionaries of Second Life devise such pro-corporate tools such as the Love Machine, which enables collaboration and appreciate to flow laterally peer-to-peer across the company, collaboration is not dependent upon digital technology and is a tactic innovated by the dependencies of social justice activism.

The lateral collaboration I viewed at the power breakfast was not an example of what we wrote about in Birds. This was not internet enabled participation, but rather collaboration between people over eggs and hearty dialogue. Email is the most sophisticated ‘new’ media system. These collaborators are all technically literate and use very sophisticated technologies in their broadcast and start-up professional lives. But they are not dependent upon digital peer-to-peer networks for the sharing of Perl code, complex video uploading systems, or sophisticated medical record aggregation databases for their collaboration. Rather, embodied meetings and simple text-based communications suffice. They set ad hoc goals and tasks and produce tools, data, and methods that are generative as opposed to being tethered to protocols within the collaborative community.

The third type of social interaction I have only remotely observed but it permeates the community. While embedded in a hardware, software, and enterprise television and internet research and development laboratory, I witnessed the excitement of employees as their company purchased a world leading internet video database. That is another story, but even without this experience I and several others at this breakfast were literally holding in our hands a physical and symbolic technology at the center of this third type of social interaction (our smart phones): the corporate merger. Throughout the media reform conference, whose final day we were beginning with a working brunch, loomed the historical reality and threat of media consolidation, vertical integration, and mass media industrial mergers of US internet, cable, and wifi industries. The mergers of T-Mobile and AT&T and NBC-Universal and Comcast were the reasons for the alarms of the magazine editor who initiated the debate of our key problem.

I begin to wonder: what is the cultural industrial logic of the corporate merger? Larger firms consume smaller ones to be able to fold their resources into the mission of the behemoth. Complementary firms consolidate their resources to achieve a larger market control. Distinct firms merge to expand their sway over new social, geographical, or technological horizons. Though stated in official press releases as benevolently balanced to those firms merging, the generous laterality I observed in the collaborating social justice media organizations, is unlikely the reality in the case of the corporate merger.

This expansive community in progressive media culture engages with all three of these forms of social interaction–participation, collaboration, and mergers. Modification, implicit, and explicit participation within organized publics, while never without aspirations or connections to formal social enterprises, is essentially on the level of the person. Social media, with ever user-interface simplicity—as well as algorithmic capitalization–is the technological kit for participation. Collaboration, on the other hand, is a tactic for under-resourced and mission driven organizations to share capacities horizontally across their field. In-person meetings, phone calls, and emails are enough of the socio-technical modalities necessary for these collaborations. Finally, is the merger, the hostile or peaceful economic takeover of complementary, heterogeneous, or homogenous firms. Financial and journalistic manipulations fill out the technological app-base for this type of social interaction.

Last Monday, February 14th, having heard a preview of the budget proposals to come, the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) of the University of Wisconsin, Madison decided to try a different sort of tack in protest. Perhaps one that had never been tried before. They organized a campaign to get thousands of undergraduate and graduate students to sign valentines, big cards with hearts on them, saying “I <3 UW. Governor Walker, Don’t Break My Heart” (image below). It was a great idea, or at least it seemed so at the time, when we didn’t realize just how uncompromising Governor Scott Walker was going to turn out to be.  It goes to show how naive we were.  We knew something bad was coming, but we didn’t know how bad it would be.

Gwen Protesting

At first, I think, like many other TAs at UW-Madison, I was convinced to protest this farce of a “budget repair” bill because we looked at it and saw how it might negatively impact our own personal lives, financial stability, and the future of the university in which we have invested so much of our energy and ourselves. We looked at it and thought about the prospect of losing our health care and tuition remission, benefits and good working conditions that only exist as the result of collective bargaining over the past 40 years. But given just a week to watch the situation unfold, and to step outside of narrow self-interest, I think we all, or at least I, have come to realize that this isn’t about us. It’s not about the budget, and it’s not about ‘fiscal responsibility’.  It’s about an attack on the right to collectively bargain, an attack on the rights of all Americans.

Tuesday February 15th was the day the s**t really hit the fan. It was the first day of protests, the first day we tried to find our footing. It was the first (and only) day that both Republicans and Democrats of the Joint Finance Committee of the Wisconsin State Government actually heard the public testify about their thoughts and feelings on the bill. That day, we were suddenly thrown into gear, and nearly two thousand people signed up to testify. The testimonies were limited to two minutes, though early in the day, they were often allowed to go on much longer. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the vast majority of them were against the bill. At first I don’t think I understood what it was we were trying to do. I had never filibustered before. But then, as the word spread, I came to understand that the point was to stall the committee vote, and therefore the State Senate and Assembly votes, to give the TAA, the other unions, and the concerned public, a chance to sway some of the Republicans to vote down or amend the bill.

That night the Joint Finance Committee heard testimony until 3am, when the Republican chair Senator Robin Vos, declared that they would adjourn. In the hallways echoing through the Capitol building, we chanted “LET US SPEAK!” It was around 1am, that Democratic Senator Lena Taylor came out to let us know the Republicans were planning to end the hearing and go home, but the Democrats would continue to hear us out.

At 2am we were quiet, listening to hearings. Senator Taylor tweeted out “Are you still there?”. I tweeted a reply “Yes, we’re here!” with a picture I’d taken on my phone of some of the masses of students sitting and listening. At 2:12am @sentaylor replied “@gwendok WOW! Look at yall! Thank you – you inspire me!”

I testified that night at 4:10am, having found a relevant quote by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937 on Wikipedia, I read it to the committee:  “The right to bargain collectively is at the bottom of social justice for the worker, as well as the sensible conduct of business affairs. The denial or observance of this right means the difference between despotism and democracy.” I cited the source, and told them they might want to verify that, as I always tell my students not to trust wikipedia as their only source. Though they were tired, they still laughed.

I’m a graduate student teaching assistant in the Anthropology department at the UW, with a new-found awareness of my identity as a public-sector worker. Because the University of Wisconsin is a public institution, and I’m a member of the TAA, the teaching assistants union, I find myself in the good, but somewhat unexpected position of shared solidarity with firefighters, cops, snow-plow drivers, health care workers, and more.

Though we find ourselves in the shared position of being under attack, we obviously come from different backgrounds in terms of class, education, and urban/rural upbringing, among other things.  As TAs, we are future (hopeful) members of academia, a position and trajectory which might represent upward mobility for many, or at least the maintenance of middle to upper-middle class position. We are also faced with the possibility that such hope of tenure-track jobs may not pan out for all of us. Given the current economy, and the fiscal policies of the current Governor of Wisconsin and many other Republican governors and policy makers, we are confronting the very real possibility of downward mobility. As a result we share the anxiety of so many about our financial futures.  We will likely end up in precisely these kinds of jobs, if it turns out we can’t get academic positions.

Scott Walker’s bill is clearly designed as a divide and conquer tactic, aimed at taking advantage of the fractures that exist in the lower middle class. He’s using a rhetoric of a widening economic gap between public sector workers who he calls the “haves”, and private sector workers, the “have-nots”. Whether that economic gap really exists is still up for debate.

A number of non-partisan studies have been shown that unionized public sector workers in Wisconsin are actually compensated less than private sector workers of comparable education by about 8%, even with benefits taken into account. But unfortunately those who still support Walker and this bill are not convinced that these are valid or unbiased. They seem to have been persuaded by Governor Walker’s and others’ (Republicans, Tea Party, Glenn Beck and Fox News) rhetoric that their suffering is the fault of the public sector workers. Or at least that they have suffered, while the public sector workers have had it easy.

At the same time, regarding the rhetoric of “fairness” it may be fair to say that those “private” (i.e., industrial, agricultural and service) sector  workers have indeed borne the brunt of the economic down-turn in terms of layoffs, mortgage foreclosures, and more. For those that are not unionized, they have had no other recourse, no protection. They technically have the right, but no actual ability to collectively bargain.

Even while Walker has attempted to use divide and conquer tactics on some part of the lower middle class (splitting the public sector workers from the so-called private sector workers), this bill has also served to unify a lot more people, including TAs like myself. Until recently I did not see myself as a “worker” in the Marxist sense, and of course I’m not really. But because we are now unified by this bill, and the attack on our collective bargaining rights, I can now say I feel the solidarity, and it is good.

I am proud to be a member of the TAA, proud of our co-presidents Alex Hanna (PhD Student in Sociology) and Kevin Gibbons (PhD Student in Geography), and proud of the Anthropology Departments TAA Stewards Alison Carter and Katie Lindstrom (who has made a big difference even though she’s in the field in Pakistan). I am proud and grateful for the many others who have been working without rest over the last week to try to kill this bill.

When it became clear that Governor Walker could not be swayed, and likely that the other Republican Senators won’t either, I started to feel some despair. I wondered what it is that we had accomplished. But then I thought back to Senator Taylor’s tweeted reply to me: “WOW! Look at yall! Thank you – you inspire me!” and I realized it is true. Without the amazing response and passion of the TAA, the other unions, AFSCME, AFT, AFL-CIO, the Firefighters, Cops, and the generally concerned and supportive citizens, we wouldn’t have the “Fighting 14”, now famous 14 Democratic state senators who fled the state of Wisconsin to prevent a quorum which would have allowed the senate to vote, and the bill to be passed. We wouldn’t have protests on the order of 80,000 people marching on the Wisconsin Capitol, with more protests in Ohio and beyond. We wouldn’t have national and international media attention.

We have accomplished something, and so has Scott Walker. This bill has galvanized a new movement of people to support the rights of workers, to support the right to bargain collectively. And I’m proud to be a part of that. I also hope it’s also more than that. I hope that this is the beginning of an opposition movement across the country to push back against the right-wing agenda in its many forms.

Gwen Kelly is a Ph.D. Candidate and Teaching Assistant in Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research is primarily on the organization and technology of craft production in Southern India during the Late Iron Age and Early Historic periods. She is also interested in the archaeology of European colonialism, missionary activity, and tribal cultures in India. She is the founder of IAWAWSA, the International Association for Women Archaeologists Working in South Asia. She blogs and can be found on twitter @gwendok.

Jonathan Zittrain’s ‘Minds for Sale’ is a provocative and compelling introduction to digital labor systems, firms, and projects. Networks, when properly articulated and managed, can accumulate a range of creative and uncreative input, he explains, from LiveOpps’ solicitation for physicists to solve a complex theoretical problem, to the more rudimentary shape-detection mouseclicking to assist computer algorithms. The level of creativity solicited in crowdsourced projects is thus a clear element to consider when empirically analyzing digital labor projects, and attempting to inductively link them to virtue-focused or free, exploited labor critiques. Yet, deeper ethnographic analysis concludes that issues like organizational culture, social mobility, history and mission, profit-sharing, and levels of agency complicate Zittrain’s pyramid model of creative (top) —> uncreative (bottom). Our reseach is thus part critique of previous scholarship on free labor/participation, part ethnography, and part analysis of the case studies to show the importance of ethnography to develop more accurate theories. Theories associated with digitally-distributed labor, or the coordination of labor through the use of networked ‘new media’ technologies, tend to fall into idealized, oppositional binaries that are judgmental rather than based on detailed analyses of the actual system or site. As such, they lack the important grounding that ethnography provides and are polemic rather than analytical. If you start ethnographically, it seems likely that these three issues will form a basis of a more nuanced critique of digital social entrepreneurship.

In three following posts, we will consider three anecdotes in order to explore these issues. In the first post we will explore YouTube and the free labor users perform to build value for Google. In the second post, we will ask questions about Amazon’s mTurk microwork system. In a final post we will explore the strange complementarity and conflict of activism video and profiteering on YouTube through an analysis of Iran’s Green Revolution and the grassroots uses of corporate technologies.

It is wonderful to have hyper-literate informants, collaborators, and subjects who write and publish books, articles, and blogs and make films, documentaries, television programs, and online videos. In the history of anthropology, however, this is rarely the case and because of this paucity anthropologists are at pains to construct theories that are native to the informant. I do not envy the anthropologist who must contextualize their subjects’ interviews and practices in terms of theories and theorists that are not a part of the subject’s worldview. Using French literary and poststructural theory to describe nonliterate tribal practices seems profoundly unanthropological and yet such practices proliferate in academic journalis at an astounding rate. We need to interpret local actions and performances with the aid of indigenous theory somehow devised from observations and pronouncements of subjects. For instance, in The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia, Tom Boellstorff identifies a local indigenous theory of the self emerging from island life in Indonesia and uses it to guide the contextualization of his gay and lesbi informants. My job is certainly easier than Tom’s because self-publishing subjects provide so much more already contextualized information with which to construct a local theory of identity and community. My informant’s published social scientific work does much of the nuanced labor of theory building for me. The citations and name-drops in their texts make explicit the forbearers, influences, and heroes an anthropologist would archaeologically extract and artificially graft onto the informant in later chapters of extrapolation and upward scaling.

What are the rare opportunities and theoretical complexities associated with doing ethnographic investigation into subjects’ lives that are already reflexively situated in autobiographical texts?

The problems include the fact that the informant/authors offer autobiographical documents about their lives in richly theoretical prose that threatens to trump the work of the anthropologist. Without the reflexive published documents the anthropologist’s primary job is to proceed to first order contextualization–what was the cultural context of this practice? What is this practice like in a comparative sense to other proximal native practices? The opportunities for the anthropologist working with this citation-rich autobiographical literature is to take the level of extrapolation and abstraction one-step further. With bibliography dense self-authored accounts, the first tier theorizing is sufficiently complete–they tell you where they are coming from–leaving the second level of extrapolation open to answering questions like: within the field of all possible indigenous theories why did the subject gravitate towards these influences? How does this native epistemology compare to others in similar–or more daringly–dissimilar contexts? Anthropologists working without self-textualizing subjects surely can get to this second tier of extrapolation but it is more difficult and the conclusions made in that ethereal space are more tenuous.

All anthropologists work with edited documents. This includes interviews which are themselves performed edits of quickly self-truncated statements. These edits–oral, performative, or textual–makes for excellent granular units of data. But at the fieldwork stage, anthropologists need more data not less, we need less self-awareness and self-censorship and more roguish personalities, off-the-cuff actions, and improvisational performances. We need the backstage along with the front stage. Self-editing is a social fact of life but such highly edited texts cut out several important phases that would have been instructive if observed–the subject’s first impressions; selective shuffling, ordering, and prioritizing of issues; the gathering of supportive sources and examples–these are all in the data rich realm of practices and negotiations around which subjectivity and the social self are framed and performed. For example, a ghost writer is writing a book for one of my informants and I want to get the transcripts, edits, and feedback in this process to see how they are contextualized by themselves and the ghost writer for a perceived and corporately constituted audience. Finely edited books, combed over by agents, managers, editors, and colleagues do not furnish such raw data.

To what degree should we be critical about how these authors prefer to textually edit themselves into particular subjectivities? Contradicting or challenge author’s stated affiliations and origins is a practice in literary studies for revising the preferred automatic claims of dead authors but like stamping non-indigenous theory on indigenous data this too is quite unanthropological. The safe route is to step off from this first tier of reflexive theorizing into a higher level of abstraction. The more dangerous path is to read the authors cited by the informant and develop a still deeper sense of indigenous theory–this is going textually native–revealing where the informant glossed over contradictions and leaned on over-simplifications in arriving at their particular framing of the self. Using this critical textual reading of reflexive indigenous theory the jump into the second tier can be made along with the informant’s peers and mentors.

This attitude is widespread in Taiwan and can be found in other areas of life as well. My favorite example is the Taiwanese driving test, which is done on what looks like a miniature race course. The skills tested on this test are very particular to the test itself. You have to avoid rubber bumps in the road which sound an alarm if hit with the tire while completing various types of maneuvers: parallel parking, pulling into a parking spot, making an “S curve” forward and backwards, etc. It is like playing a life-sized computer game. Because the race track is so standardized, you can train on a practice course identical to the test course. Instructors will tell you exactly how many times to turn the wheel at each location. If you memorize their instructions, it is very hard to fail. (There is no need to even drive at normal driving speeds, you can take the test as slowly as you like.) This is very different from the driving test I took in NY which tested some similar maneuvers, but took place on a normal street with other cars and at a normal driving pace. Taiwanese would object to such a test because there is the NY version of the test relies too much on the judgement of the person administering the test, and so the test might not be the same for every candidate. (A friend who claims to have been failed on the NY test because she is an immigrant woman would probably prefer the Taiwanese system.)

Recent educational reforms have shift from a single national entrance exam towards the US system of having people directly apply to universities. While reformers point to the advantage of moving away from high-stakes testing (which the NCLB is belatedly imposing on the US educational system), many parents and teachers object to the possibility of increasingly unfair outcomes. Now, one could argue that a system partially dependent on how much parents can afford to pay for cram schools isn’t exactly “fair,” but for Taiwanese parents the new system imposed the possibility of personal preference, family connections, and perhaps even cultural capital, making it much harder for them to know the rules of the game. The end result was that Taiwan never fully abandoned the national exams and currently has two systems: you can apply directly to the university, or you can get in via the national exam.

From my perspective, as trained scholars, we should be trusted to make professional judgements about issues like plagiarism, student qualifications, etc., but I often run up against the objection that this would not be fair. While I don’t exactly disagree, it isn’t clear to me that the seemly more objective measures my colleagues propose are any less subject to bias. I’m still grappling with the exact nature of the differences, but I think I’m simply more willing to demand that my judgement be given some authority on the basis of my training, whereas my colleagues generally want to look for some external measure to which they can point in case their decision is challenged as being “unfair.”

And here is a picture of the view (on a more typically cloudy day) looking back, from the balcony near my office.

Most of the people who live on the East Coast of Taiwan reside in a narrow valley between the Coastal Mountain Range (top picture) and the larger Central Mountain Range (bottom picture). The valley starts in Hualien city, and continues down about about a hundred miles, to the next coastal city, Taitung. About thirty miles south is the village where I did my fieldwork. Apart from the great scenery and the chance to improve my Chinese, that is one of the main reasons I took this job. But it is now four years since I came here and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve made that thirty mile trip. That’s what I’d like to talk about in this post. I think the reasons give some insight into what life is like as an expat professor in Taiwan, what it means to teach near your field site, as well as some of the unique aspects of my current situation.

There are a number of reasons why I spend so little time at my old field site. One of them is that, as they say, “you can’t step in the same river twice.” It’s been a decade since I did my fieldwork, and the people I knew there have mostly moved on. I worked in an elementary school, and few people stay in the same place for more than four years. Some I’m still friends with. A teacher who teaches in the mountains south of Taipei, a baseball coach who is currently staying at my cousin’s house in Ohio has he studies for his Ph.D., and a few others I see now and then. But there are only a few people I know still living back in the village.

The other reason is that I’m busy. Taiwanese teachers typically have a 3-3 teaching load, as well as the usual advising and bureaucratic responsibilities. Since I arrived here I’ve developed over eleven new course syllabi – all of which I teach in Chinese. I mention this because it means I need to spend about four times as long preparing my courses as I would if I taught in English. The knowledge that almost all of my colleagues completed Ph.D.’s in Western Universities keeps me from making too much of my language situation. One get’s a lot more leeway teaching in a foreign language than one gets as a student, and I certainly couldn’t write a dissertation in Chinese, not to mention a term paper. Even now, for academic promotion, my colleagues are expected to publish and present papers in English whereas I can get by without having to write much Chinese at all.

The thing is, when I came they told me that I could teach in English because the government is trying to promote more English language classes. I tried it for a semester, but soon gave up. For one thing, less than a fifth of the students had sufficient English skills to follow me. Another reason is that we need at least ten students to get full credit for an undergraduate class. Although Taiwanese teachers get double credits for teaching in English – the same doesn’t apply to me as a foreigner, even though the problems I face are the same. But, over time, I’ve gotten better at it. The Ph.D. Cultural Theory course, which used to be the one class I did teach in English, I taught in Chinese (or Chinglish) this year. I still depend mostly on English language texts (giving my students translations when possible), but this semester was the first time I used a Chinese-only text in one of my classes, something I hope to slowly increase over time. [See this post I wrote some time back about the lack of texts in translation.]

But the biggest reason that I return to my field site so rarely has little to do with how busy I am teaching, and everything to do with how busy I am when I’m on break. Just at the time I got this job I was embarking on what turned out to be a four year project working on a documentary film in India. This has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done in my life, and I don’t regret it for an instant, but it does mean that when I do have a break I’m often jumping on board a plane to India (as, indeed, I’m doing again in about ten days time).

Despite everything I’ve said, I don’t mean to imply I haven’t been doing new research here in Taiwan. I have! About a year ago I started a series of posts on learning an endangered language and after that I interviewed some indigenous language teachers. While that work has been on hold over the past few months, I hope to take it up again as soon as we return from India. There is a paper I want to do on the subject and my New Year’s resolution is to get a first draft done by the end of the summer, and to turn it into a research proposal by the end of the year (when the National Science Council research deadline is).

Speaking of papers. Although it took me about three years to get into a schedule that works for me, I have lately also begun to figure out how to crank out those papers – something I need to do a lot more of if I’m going to pass the six year review required of all Taiwanese academics. Although there are the first inklings of a shift towards book-length manuscripts at some research institutions, here the focus is still on academic papers. A lot of credit is given for journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index which is annoying, since so many great anthropology journals aren’t listed there. My department has been supportive in giving me some credit for my online and multimedia work as well. I’m hopeful that the documentary film will be able to be included in my review.

One thing I’ve had to cut back on is conferences. It is just too costly and too time consuming to attend too many conferences from here. The school and the National Science Council do give faculty some support, but as much as I’d like to go to more conferences, I need to spend that precious time working on getting those papers out. I think, in general, this is true for junior faculty no matter where you are – but the distance (and jet lag) makes it even more true. To the extent possible, I have been trying to attend regional conferences, which can often be an exciting way to explore the region and (of course) network.

So, that’s why I don’t spend much time in my field site. But I’m learning a lot just by living and working here. For one thing, about half the students in our college are Taiwanese Aborigines, which is quite remarkable when you think that less than two percent of Taiwanese are Aborigines. Being a good teacher and advisor means learning from my students, which means being a good ethnographer. (Hopefully I can write some of that down in another blog post sometime.) Whether it is student term papers on indigenous issues, or problems advisees are facing at home, I’m picking up a lot about indigenous life by osmosis.

Below is video of a graduation day ceremony featuring cultural traditions from many of the different indigenous communities represented at our university:

In a way, I feel like I am now, a decade after I finished up my dissertation field work, finally ready to begin the task I started at that time. I feel that my first four years teaching here have given me a very special kind of training. And the learning process has made being a junior faculty member that much more exciting than it might have been otherwise. So even though I rarely go back to my old field site, it has still been a fantastic learning experience for me. Even though there may be limited opportunities for Ph.D.s to get academic appointments within the US, with the increasing globalization of higher education there are more and more opportunities abroad. I hope that this post might help others decide if doing so is right for them.