Moving on.  While my wife was doing interviews, I ended up playing games and hanging out with a lot of the local kids.  Not a bad gig, eh?  Well, I was also the free research assistant, and I went along on many of the interviews, too.  In addition I did a stint of archaeological survey work for a few weeks–just to let you know that it wasn’t all just homeruns and striking out little kids for me that summer (kidding, of course, I let some of them get hits).  But I did play a lot of baseball with the kids when there was downtime.  We used to play tons of games in the solar (i.e. yard) of the house where we were staying.  These games included about 4-5 kids from the family we were renting from, and a whole slew of kids from around the pueblo.  Pretty fun.  Whenever I got back to the house all the kids wanted to play.  Often, they totally wore me out.   It became a pretty regular thing.  But then, I noticed something.

The kids who came over to play were only from certain households.  Other kids never came by, or were explicitly told to stay away by the kids in the household where we were renting.  I didn’t know this was happening at first…but I slowly started figuring things out.  Certain kids would approach me and ask about baseball when I wasn’t at our house, and I thought it was strange that they never actually came over…until the whole mystery started to make more sense.  I also remember some kids hanging out on the edge of the yard, leaning on the wall watching us play.  I’d ask them if they wanted to play, but they would politely refuse every time.  Why didn’t they every want to actually  play?

Well, it’s because those kids who didn’t come over, or who refused to play, knew more about the surrounding community politics than Veronica and I did at the time.  Sure, in some cases, this was a matter in which some kids just don’t like some other kids.  But in many other cases, there was more to it–some of the histories and politics of the adults in the community were filtering down through the kids, and this was showing up in something seemingly innocuous like these afternoon baseball games.  And these kids knew all about it.  In short, some of the kids in the pueblo were persona non grata at this house because of the bad relationships among all their parents.  Now, this isn’t really a shocking reality, but in the context of doing anthropological fieldwork, it was an important lesson.

Why?  Because we realized that where we were staying had its own small, but definitely important, politics effects.  Some members of the community felt comfortable coming by–and others did not.  This was a pretty important lesson, and both Veronica and I learned a lot from the whole experience.  The first thing we did was move the baseball games from a specific residence to a public place–we started playing in the plaza, next to the old stone church that’s hundreds of years old.  This worked out much better, and managed to help put the lid on some of the simmering kid politics (certain kids were less prone to little power plays once we were in public).  But what we also learned was that we have to pay close attention to the effects of the place where we actually end up living–and find ways to deal with issue that crop up.  Of course, there is probably no way to find a place that is completely apolitical or neutral in ANY community.  But it does help to recognize these kinds of things–whether they show up in kids games or elsewhere–and adjust accordingly.

The fury: When I finally checked the recording later that night, the rain made it almost impossible to hear the conversation.  The voices of mother and son were swept up in an auditory wrecking ball that sounded more like a tornado than raindrops.  The interview was still salvageable, but it was hardly a masterpiece of ethnographic audio.  Frustrating.

The admission: While I have a lot of experience in photography, I do not have a lot of experience making high quality audio recordings.  And if we’re going to record interviews, we should make them as good as possible, right?  Sure, I have used digital recorders that do the trick, but the overall quality of most of my interviews hasn’t been exactly stellar.  They have been decent, but not great.  The above incident (which took place during my MA field research) caused me to upgrade my digital recorder to a Zoom H2, which was certainly a step in the right direction.  Still, while I know how to handle a whole slew of difficult lighting situations in photography, I am willing to admit that I have a lot to learn when it comes to recording audio in tricky situations.  Two situations create consistent problems for me: 1) when there is a decent amount of background noise (traffic, dogs barking, rain, etc); and 2) windy, or even slightly breezy situations (which can ruin audio pretty easily).

The question(s): How do you deal with difficult sound/audio situations?  Do you have any tips or methods that help you in these kinds of tricky situations?  What about controlling/mitigating background noise?  Dealing with wind (e.g. what accessories/tools do you use to cut noise)?

*As a gesture of reciprocity, here is a quick, basic tip for photography in the field.  If you want to photograph someone in the middle of the day (when the sun is blazing overhead)…just look for what’s called “open shade” lighting.  That’s basically shade that is just on the edge of bright sunlight–whether under a porch, just inside a doorway, or any other even shadow (watch out for shade under trees because this can produce patchy light).  Open shade blocks direct sun and keep the lighting nice and even.  Just place the person right inside the shade line, but facing the sunlight–this will provide that even light (and avoid really deep shadows).  Here’s the key: the bright sunlight is reflected off the ground to fill in the shaded subject, which creates excellent light.  Much better than trying to photograph people in blinding sunlight all the time.  As one blogger over at “Pioneer Woman Photography” writes, “Open Shade is Your Best Friend” (this link gives a pretty good rundown, including some tips about white balance).  When it comes to photography, simplicity goes a long way.

**Apologies to those of you photographically hip Savage Minds out there who already know about the wonders of open shade.  I tried.  Maybe next time.

We get backed into a corner, with no place to turn.  Our choices are cut off–we are stuck with the hassles of lines, rules, and forms.  We wait on phones, we try to find official offices with no address.  You know what I’m talking about.  We become not just fools in this process, but blithering fools.  But there is power in the inefficiency of bureaucracies–Weber knew that, as did many others.  You know that too, don’t you?  If you want to know more about this, please click here for more options.

Apologies for that…there must be some sort of glitch in the system.  I will send out a request for someone to post a note about composing an email to resolve this issue at a later date.  Please wait.  In the mean time, if you haven’t read David Graeber’s “Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity,” well, you should.  Here is your chance.

Let me give you a short example of the hilarity of bureaucracy from some of my recent travel experiences:

Setting: A small taco stand in the middle of a well-known tourism destination in Mexico.  The taco stand is located alongside the street, in a very small space next to a little convenience story that sells things like soda and sabritas. Novelas are on the TV (novelas are, for those of you who don’t know, soap operas).

Cast: Myself, and a few good friends.  The cast also includes the very nice people who own the stand, the unseen phone caller, and the official who shows up to complicate the general plot.  And then there is the big official who is in charge of everything, but that’s not for a bit.

Plot: We are at this taco place because said good friends really, really wanted to go there because this place is the best in town.  Plus, we are hungry and need to get some food before a long drive.

So we arrive, greet the owners who are working hard, and sit down.  We order.  Fish tacos for some, and shrimp tacos for the more daring.  One friend decides to walk down the street and buy two beers to drink with lunch.  He does this because beer is not sold in this small taco stand.

Suddenly, after only a few minutes, an official appears on scene.  He does not look at us, but instead talks grimly with the owner of the taco shop.  Things look serious.  Is this about us?  I see the Spanish word for “alcohol” on the back of his uniform.  Sure enough, it IS about us, and those two beers that we have on the table.  Apparently, it is a BIG PROBLEM to have these two beers here, because the owner of the taco shop does not have authorization to have alcohol on his property.  This is little more than a taco stand, mind you.  A small cart, a shade, and one plastic table with some chairs alongside the street.

There are no signs posted–this is just the law.  This is how things work, even if it doesn’t always work that way for many other shops and businesses all around this taco stand.  Plus, the official tells us, someone called in this complaint so it has to be dealt with.  If he did not deal with it, he could get fired.  The fine?  Two thousand US dollars (which is an exorbitant amount of money all things considered).  Who pays?  The owner of the taco stand, who doesn’t exactly make a ton of money.  The owner categorically refuses to even consider paying any fine.  He looks around the street and tells us that this is about jealousy.

We all feel terrible for this seemingly random–and overly punitive–citation.  People drink beer at taco stands all the time.  Why is this case such a big deal?  The officer responds that this is just the way things are, and there is nothing he can do about it.  Besides, we all should have known better–and there was the caller.  The one who got the bureaucratic machine to awaken.  There’s nothing that can be done.  The process has already been started and now it just has to be seen through.  The process is in charge now.  My friend makes one last attempt: I have been traveling here for 30 years and nothing like this has ever happened!  Tough, says the official.  These are the rules.

He writes up the citation and leaves.  We talk with the owner and agree to go to court with him the following day.

The next day we meet him downtown, where we can talk to the big official who is in charge of all this.  The office is small.  Other people are waiting to pay their fines.  These are not rich people who are here to pay, let me put it that way.  We wait, but not for too long.  We step into the office of the official, which is full of what we assume to be contraband liquor that has been seized.  We state our case, and he listens.  The taco stand owner goes first, but doesn’t make much ground.  Then we give it a try.  First of all, we tell the official that this is not the fault of the taco shop owner–it is our fault.  We should be to blame.  We also argue that this should be a warning, since there were no signs posted, there were no other offenses, and since the law is so ambiguous.

He is done listening and tells us: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”  He also asks us this pointed question: “If I was in YOUR country and this happened, tell me, what would happen to me?”  One of my friends, who happens to be an attorney AND a restaurant owner, replies: “Well, depending on the situation, you would probably get a warning, especially if this was a first offense.  Besides, while ignorance of the law is no excuse, we also have to take account of intent, no?”

This last line did not please the big official.  It was a good try, though.   But it may have made things worse.  The official  is visibly upset.  He apologizes and says there is little he can do.  The process is what it is, and the law is the law.  He makes a show of punching up some numbers on a calculator.  He reduces the fine substantially, but that was all he could do.  He tells us that we are indeed responsible, along with the owner.  Rules.  Laws.  Regulations.

The fine had to be paid, regardless of all the ambiguity.  He directs us to the other office down the hall where we needed to go to pay the bill.  After we pay, we were to come back and show proof of paying.  There is a thirty dollar fee for the services and time of the big official.  In effect, this is a small toll that must be paid in order to grease the wheels of business and politics.  We all know it.  What choices did we have?  We pay the fine, feeling somewhat victorious because at least it wasn’t two grand.  It’s not really a victory though.  All of this time and money over two beers.  Rules are rules, except when they’re not.  The process controls all.  We are stuck in its tentacles–all of us.  The officials–everyone.  There is power in the nonsense of it all.  It happens here, and everywhere.

End.

*Hilarious Firefox image comes from here.

I usually get a substantial segment of the class from other disciplines — graduate students who want to do ethnographic work in education, business, sociology, or whatnot and want to see how The Anthros do it. Even though other fields have been doing fieldwork as long or longer than us, we somehow capture the imagination of other disciplines as doing the ‘real’ or ‘most intense’ version of ethnographic work. In fact, often we have a bit of a mystical aura around us since no one can figure out exactly what we do, they just know we do it in some extremely ineffable way. Which, too often, is anthropology’s self-understanding as well.

When we read Marcus-and-Clifford postmodernism in my fieldmethods class, non-anthropology graduate students find their ideas not only uncontroversial, but actually the most scientific of the stuff on the syllabi. While the anthropologists consider postmodern reflexivity to be narcissistic, the non-anthros consider it to be the closest thing our discipline has produced to a ‘methods section’: something in the ethnography that describes what we actually did in the field. While the anthropologists approach collaborative anthropology and the decentering of their epistemological authority with a mixture of erotic longing and dread, the non-anthros consider it to be a sensible attempt to check the validity of research results against the intuitions of research respondents.

I think there’s something deeply ironic — and also very insightful — about this take on anthropology’s now-canonized apostates. But I’m not sure what. That anthropology was so far down the rabbit hole that postmodernism looks like an attempt at answerability? That postmodernism is just common sense about the research process with an -OfTheContemporary suffix attached at the end? Or something else?

Let me know what you figure out.

And you say to yourself: Now what?

Just getting yourself to the field can be a trek in an of itself.  Even if you aren’t working half way around the world from your university (I’m not, since I am working in Mexico, which is relatively close).  These things take time.  You have to think about really basic things like transportation, possible medical issues, insurance, communication…and of course food.  There are a lot of things to be worked out when setting up fieldwork, and a lot of decisions to be made and logistical problems to be solved.

Enough of the preamble: this is a post about books.  Choosing books, to be more succinct.  So, when I got on my flight to head down to Mexico, one of the tough decisions that I had to make was which books I was going to take with me.  I narrowed things down to one box, and then had to narrow that down even more.  There’s only so much room in a 737 after all.  The good news for me, at least, is that I am actually going back to the US and then driving back down to Mexico–which will give me the chance to bring even MORE books.  Not too many, of course.  I promise.  For many people who have to travel really far, this is not an option, so the initial book-choosing is all the more critical.

Now is the part of this post where things get interactive.  If you had to choose a half dozen or so absolutely essential anthropological books to take into the field, what would they be?  Here is my list of essential books that I took with me on this trip:

1. The Professional Stranger by Michael H. Agar (Never read this one before this year, so I bought it.  Agar has a good way of laying out and talking about some of the key issues in ethnography.  I’m re-reading it now).

2. The Art of Fieldwork by Harry Wolcott (I’ve always liked Wolcott’s take on ethnography).

3. Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology by H. Russell Bernard (This is an older text, but still full of good stuff.  Sure, I have read through more recent editions of Bernard’s methods books, but this one is still good…and it’s a nice small paperback too).

4. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes by Emerson et al (Definitely time to browse through this one again, that’s why it made the list).

5. Global Transformations by Michel Rolf Trouillot (I have read parts of this book, but not the whole thing.  I took this along almost entirely because Jason Antrosio mentions it so often and that makes me want to read it all the more).

6. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value by David Graeber (This book is the one that I have been scouring quite a lot for the last year or so.  If Graeber’s book on debt wasn’t so big that would have come too.  That’ll come down in the Jeep in January, for sure).

7. The Human Economy by Keith Hart et al (I have been reading a lot more of Hart’s work the last year as well.  Great stuff.  This new edited volume is packed with all kinds of good chapters.  Definitely a good choice for any economically minded anthros out there, since it covers a wide territory).

8. Coffee and Community by Sarah Lyon (Dr Lyon is my adviser…definitely gonna read this one inside and out).

Ok, so that’s eight books instead of a half dozen.  It happens.  One interesting thing is that I felt pretty compelled to bring a lot of methods books.  Did you do this as well–or I am the only one?  I’m interested to hear what books you brought to the field, and, more importantly, why.  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?

*The top important book that I MEANT to bring but somehow forgot?  Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History.  Ouch.  Gotta bring that one for sure.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Personally, I find I do better work when my research subjects are people who have a kind of critical consciousness which allows them to function as real collaborators in the investigation process. This isn’t a question of education or class. I’ve worked with people from poor communities who, as a result of years of activism, were much more articulate and critical of their own situation than fairly middle-class school teachers with master’s degrees. Nor is it a question of having similar politics to my research subjects, although I find that can help. Much more important is that sense that my subjects are themselves invested in the research process.

Good research requires spending a tremendous amount of time with your subjects and making significant demands on their time as well. There are all kinds of claims people make for the superiority of one research methodology over another, but I think it often comes down to who we feel comfortable working with – and what kinds of people feel comfortable working with us. Of course, there are often cases where we must do research with unsympathetic subjects, and that’s an important skill to have, but I think there are very few ethnographers who can do good work without the benefit of some kind of bond with their informants. You don’t have to like them, but you do have to be able to work with them – and working with them means much more than just having them tolerate your presence.

How do you define “ordinary” video makers? Given that online video is being generated at phenomenal rates (YouTube 2010), it is not surprising that studies are tackling previously ignored sets of everyday video practices. A number of important and insightful studies have been concerned with a special kind of the everyday, that which focuses on the so-called “ordinary” video maker. Such a figure is often ostensibly defined as a non-professional in the film industry. They have neither been trained nor are participating in mainstream film production or critique.

The focus on the ordinary video maker is initially a logical one, given that many researchers would like to understand how people learn to make videos, why they share them, and how everyday video impacts online attention economies in comparison to professional works. It some quarters, the focus on the “ordinary” is a reaction to what some see as well-covered fandom studies that focus on advanced amateurs producing cool stuff. However, it is time to re-examine what is meant by the “ordinary” and to consider how such a mythic figure threatens to reify the binary between the novice and the professional that grass-roots video making has long had the potential to challenge. It is time to explore lenses, such as collective nostalgia, that appeal to many different types of video makers. Researching generational or cultural forms of nostalgia and its influence on video making could provide a wealth of insight into the cultural desires and practices of particular social groups.

At this juncture, it is time to dust off our Stebbins (1977) and realize that the world of everyday video is quite complicated and consists of overlapping continuums not only of video making roles, but of individual talents that contribute to expressing the self through media. We also need to reconsider why the “ordinary” video maker seems to capture scholars’ imaginations. What are the consequences of seeking that ordinary person who seems to be untainted by professional or even fan-driven image making? Why are their experiences deemed more valuable, say, to the study of informal learning than people who lie somewhere in between, or engage in multiple kinds of practices?

The term “ordinary” video maker is not necessarily isomorphic with all ethnographically- observed everyday video creation. Although the “ordinary” video maker is often defined as someone who operates outside of the film industry, its assumed ontological parameters raise important questions. For example, why is a person who is a professional photographer, but not a professional filmmaker deemed “ordinary” for the purposes of studying everyday video? One study (Buckingham et al. 2011), which did not focus on photographs, did count such a person as ordinary, while another, which did examine home photography did not (Chalfen 1987). Others may define the ordinary video maker as “any amateur working outside the institutional structures of the television and movie industry” (Strangelove 2010: 3). By this definition, would someone who photographs a movie star for television be excluded from a study of ordinary video making? What about someone who photographs, say, nature pictures for magazines?

Yet, what crucial skills and literacies images might a professional or amateur photographer bring to the enterprise of making videos on the web? I have seen video bloggers commend professional photographers for their beautiful videos in the video blogging community. Clearly, people with photographic skill sets are bringing something very important to the exercise. We can ask the same questions of many other professionals, including web designers, authors, advertising executives, marketing specialists, interior designers, painters, sculptors, artists, scholars, and others who bring extremely important talents and skills to the craft of mediating a message.

Conversely, a number of people would be excluded from most such studies, even though they might be rather ordinary, in terms of their overall knowledge and approach to actually making videos. The “professional” label may over determine assumed success of osmotic learning. Are all professional actors and actresses equally knowledgeable about operating cameras, writing narrative scripts, working lights, or editing?

In addition, what does it mean to include people who fall outside the category of professionals, yet have important ties to people who are in these industries? Anthropologists and ethnographers may very profitably contribute to media studies by examining the social networks and practices of everyday media makers that are often ignored in ego-centric media studies that focus on the sole media creator. What does it mean to have a brother, parent, uncle, aunt, cousin, or other peer who is a professional media maker (Lange Forthcoming)? Studies often carve out the binary of novice- professional in a way that reifies this binary, without considering the effects of social networks that people participate in.

Finally, the category of ordinary is largely presented as a synchronic one in prior studies (Lange 2008). It freezes a video maker into an ideal type that sees no progression or change. But the term “ordinary” is, in linguistic terms, a shifter; its meaning shifts according to context and over time. What of the former television editor who decides to video blog and share her message with the world? It is quite clear that such a person is not really “ordinary,” given her skill set.

On the other side of the coin, a few people on YouTube who have no professional ties to media making have been quite successful attracting attention on the site. A person who succeeds in an online attention economy (say receiving millions of views on their videos) may not be operating in the traditional television and movie industries, but they clearly have non-ordinary skill levels or literacies of some variety to attract such substantial attention. Studying everyday and commonly-observed practices is not the same as searching for the mythic “ordinary” user, with its connotations of purity, ignorance, and mediated innocence.

If pushed too far, the notion of seeking the “ordinary” video maker as the only or most relevant category for understanding everyday media-making patterns can resemble what Rony referred to as visual taxidermy (1996). For Rony (1996: 101), ethnographic taxidermy referred to making a dead thing seem to “look as if it were still living.” If future studies overly rely on finding video makers innocent of imagery in a heavily mediated world, they risk concocting falsely authentic or “pure” media innocents who have not been too swayed by the so-called “mental pollution” (Sontag 1997: 24) of professional imaging. Characterizing intensive interactions with images as pollution rather than as opportunities for acquiring media production or interpretive skills is quite telling. Why do scholars seem to wax nostalgic for the ordinary? And what are the implications for studies that seek to freeze “ordinary” video makers’ abilities in time?

It is perhaps time to stop looking for the pure, “ordinary” non-professional video maker and seek other research questions and agendas that acknowledge the more sociologically slippery and interwoven landscape in video-making craft and online attention economies. Nostalgia offers a potentially rich area of investigation. What is of interest is not latent nostalgia for media thrown in a drawer and not seen again, but rather, active nostalgia of viewers in different age cohorts or cultures. YouTube is filled with countless clips of old professional media including television shows, commercials, parodies, and many other forms that people annotate and share with other people. It also includes videos of people who are nostalgic for places they used to visit and experiences they used to share. Why is it important to keep re-experiencing particular events of one’s past? Notably, nostalgia is a “democratic affliction,” (Boym 2001) meaning that people’s longings for the past are not purely individualized, but are often felt among cohorts of people who are dealing with similar changes in their life course (Lange 2011). Anthropologists are well-equipped to understand the relationship between media, life cycles, and different cultural cohorts’ mediated meanings and desires.

Studying nostalgia is not dependent upon binaries. Many people who are rank novices, advanced amateurs, and professionals all seem to gravitate at one time or another to creating, viewing, or sharing media that serve important cultural functions. Researchers may ask, what is accomplished for the self and social group when media or mediated memories are re-worked or circulated for large social groups online? How does the nostalgia-inflected media of one generation or cultural group differ from those of another?

Surely there are many other lenses to pursue that do not depend upon reifying particular binaries. If we are all going to wax nostalgic about video, let us not do so by seeking to taxidermy a mythic ordinary user, but rather to embrace video making as it exists in all of its non-binary, messy complexity. Let us study other people’s visual taxidermy, or rather, their nostalgic attempts at managing mediated, collective responses to change.

Patricia G. Lange is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is scheduled to be a keynote speaker at the Transforming Audiences 3 conference, September 1-2, 2011 at the University of Westminster in London. Website: patriciaglange.org Email: plange {at} usc(.)edu

NOTES

Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic.

Buckingham, David, Rebekah Willett, and Maria Pini. 2011. Home Truths? Video Production and Domestic Life. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Chalfen, Richard. 1987. Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Lange, Patricia G. Forthcoming. Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies (manuscript in progress).

Lange, Patricia G. Forthcoming 2011. Video-mediated Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Technical Competencies. Visual Communication 10(1).

Lange, Patricia G. 2008. (Mis)Conceptions about YouTube,” Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, Eds. Pp. 87-100. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, Retrieved February 28, 2011 from http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/files/2008/10/vv_reader_small.pdf

Rony, Fatimah Tobing. 1996. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: Duke University Press.

Stebbins, Robert A. 1977. The Amateur: Two Sociological Definitions. The Pacific Sociological Review 20(4): 582-606.

YouTube. 2010. YouTube Blog. Great Scott! Over 35 Hours of Video Uploaded Every Minute to YouTube. Retrieved February 28, 2011 from http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/11/great-scott-over-35-hours-of-video.html

First a brief backstory: from 1998-2000, I attended urban planning graduate school. Halfway through, I realized I was far more interested in analyzing cities than planning them, especially because (at that point anyway) in NYC “planning” often meant little more than manufacturing windfall profits for developers. So I headed off to the CUNY Graduate Center to work with their flock of urbanists.

Flashing forward to 2003: my dissertation research begins. The idea is for me to investigate the process by which the “business agenda” comes to be. Basically, what I am trying to do here is use ethnography to explore what happens in the gap between the functional requirements of capitalist urbanization (as laid out by Harvey, Castells, Molotch and Logan, etc. etc.) and the construction of an actual elite agenda in a specific historical, cultural, and geographical context. My focus is on the public spaces of development policy formation, such as conferences and other professional meetings, city council hearings, etc., but also on more informal mechanisms. For the latter, I draw on the network of contacts I began developing in graduate school, and I soon find out that the development policy world in NYC is pretty small and interlinked (I had an excel spreadsheet with just a couple of hundred names on it). I begin talking to people, attending those conferences, interviewing, and so on.

As I do so, I quickly realize three things. First, the Bloomberg administration is up to something different than I expect, given the standard shape of neoliberal urban governance in NYC or elsewhere. The administration is engaging in citywide urban planning, moving away from the use of indiscriminate tax subsidies, and perhaps most interestingly pulling a lot of new people into City Hall. Not surprisingly, given the new Mayor’s background in business, this includes several people from finance and other private sector industries. Less expected is the hiring of a number of very well-respected planning and policy professionals to staff the top levels of the Bloomberg administration’s development and planning agencies. Such people had largely been excluded from previous administration in favor of folks drawn from the real estate industry or from the murky world of NYC’s public-private development agencies (which basically amounts to the same thing). Bloomberg’s City Hall is becoming a hotbed corporate and professional technocracy.

Second, the Mayor’s business background (along with that of the other private sector people he was bringing into government) actually seems to matter in substantive ways. Economic development officials are telling the city council about the thorough rebranding campaign underway; city officials are referring to companies as “clients”; City Hall was being physically remodeled along the lines the Mayor had used in his private company, Bloomberg LLP; and perhaps most remarkably, the Mayor is referring to NYC as a “luxury product.” Importing private-sector logic into government is nothing new, in NYC or elsewhere, but now it is being done by people who can (and do!) credibly claim to be running the city like a private company.

Third, everybody in the development and policy world is focused on the far west side of Manhattan. Everybody. Nobody wants to talk about the business agenda formation; they want to talk about the Hudson Yards (the plan proposed for the area). The Bloomberg administration is joining NYC2012 (the city’s private Olympic bid organization), the Group of 35 (an elite commission charged with stimulating office development in NYC), the New York Jets, and a number of other planning and development groups in targeting the area to the west of Times Square and Penn Station for redevelopment. And as it turned out, graduate school classmates of mine are involved in the growing conflict over far west side redevelopment in a number of ways–some working for city agencies, others working for community organizations that oppose the plan as currently formulated.

This was a key point in my research; suddenly focusing on the process of business agenda formulation seemed a bit boring, especially since I had a full-scale development battle emerging in front of me! I also had this interesting phenomenon of the ex-CEO mayor actually running the city as a business (rather than just for business), which seemed to have some unpredictable consequences (like a willingness to raise taxes and hire egghead professors and policy professionals and respect their expertise). Finally, I had all these professionals–city planners, professors, public health experts, markets, educational experts, former management consultants, etc.–talking about the new spirit of professionalism and competence in City Hall, and the new excitement about public service that they and their peers were feeling.

Realizing all this, I began to split my research onto two tracks. First, I began investigating the early years of the Bloomberg administration, i.e. late 2001 to mid-2003, using interviews with officials, government documents, transcripts of administration testimony to the city council, and various secondary sources. Second, I threw myself into the conflict over the far west side of Manhattan, attending every community meeting, rally, city council hearing, conference, and official planning meeting I could find, and redirecting my interviewing towards those engaged in the conflict. I’ll write a bit more about the second, more ethnographic of these two tracks next time.

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.

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!

“Humor is one of the fugitive forms of insubordination.”
– Donna Goldstein, Laughter Out of Place

It is January 12 again. This week is making everything feel raw again. What’s an anniversary, really? Why should the 365-day cycle back to a calendar date, an orbit around the sun, have anything to do with anything? But then, January 12 — douz janvye — like 9/11 for Americans, has become a symbol in its own right. The date is more than just the anniversary of the quake. Douz janvye 2011 means that the international community’s eyes are on Haiti again. Journalists and camera crews are back and asking “How is Haiti doing, a year after the quake?” And the strange thing is, it might be the one week when no one wants to answer that question, when people just want to have the space to remember or to avoid their ghosts.

Today there will be stories about the ongoing failure of international aid, the undisbursed promised donor funds, the decay and absence of the Haitian state. There will be stories about dreadful conditions in the camps. There will be the predictable half-hearted attempts at writing something with a positive spin – a few tired human interest stories premised on “hope” and “resilience.” I want to write something different. I’m supposed to write about the anniversary, but I want to write about jokes.

Haitians are very funny. (How’s that for anthropological nuance?) They like to tease. They like jokes—silly, raunchy, or political. The observation that hardship and humor go hand-in-hand is hardly novel or original; it borders on cliché. Yet humor is something that doesn’t come through in most mainstream media and humanitarian depictions of Haiti, which largely focus on those details of life that are deemed most immediate and newsworthy: the earthquake; the spread of cholera; the ongoing plight of people living in the camps, coping with loss and deprivation and faced with eviction; unfolding political upheaval. All those things are important to know and to act upon, to be sad and enraged about. At the same time, collectively these kinds of news have a flattening effect, rendering individual Haitians exemplary victims who can represent the majority of victimized Haitians, but erasing the kinds of details that make them recognizable, relatable and…human.


So this douz janvye – to remind myself and anyone who reads this that people who died were once simply people, and people who survived are still simply people – I am going about it sideways, writing not about the earthquake or any of the other calamities directly, but rather about the jokes people tell.

* * * * * * * * * * * *
The first earthquake joke I heard goes like this:

Jesus and Satan run into each other on the street. Satan says to Jesus, “Look at that country there, Haiti. That’s mine. All the evil, the violence, the suffering – Haiti is my country.” Jesus looks at Satan and says, “Oh, really? Let’s see about that.” Then he picks up Haiti and begins to shake it and shake it, and everyone cries out, “Oh, Jezi, Jezi, sove m Jezi! Save me, Jesus!” Jesus puts Haiti down, turns to Satan and says, “You see? Haiti is mine.”

While Haitians find this joke hilarious (doubled-over laughing, gasping for breath), foreigners never do. I tried telling it to my mother, who found it, in her words, “creepy.” This joke shows the country wedged in a game of one-upmanship between cosmic “good” and “evil,” although the role of the “good” seems awfully tenuous. This humor is dark, absurd, and context-specific – but everyone gets it.
Another earthquake-related joke features traditional Haitian folk characters, dimwitted Bouki and clever, tricky Ti Malis:

Bouki and Ti Malis are looking up at the stars. Bouki says, “Look at all those stars, Malis. Look how many they are, how far away, how they glitter. What do you think it all means?” Malis responds, “Monchè, it means someone has stolen our tarp!”

These familiar characters, whose stories people have heard since childhood, are transposed, like everyone else, to the transformed post-earthquake landscape of tents, camps, and tarps. Yet their predictable personalities – Bouki’s dreamy naïveté and Malis’s cruel pragmatism, key elements of the humor – remain intact and familiar.

People’s personal earthquake narratives – stories of fear, survival and loss – are laced with a surprising quantity of humor. Many people, even those who were injured or lost their homes and loved ones, start laughing when they describe seeing their neighbors who happened to be bathing at 4:53 on January 12 and who fled their homes toutouni, stark naked. And they laugh when I describe how, the first time I pulled my pants down to pee after being pulled from the rubble, chunks of concrete fell out of my underwear, making me hysterical as I tried to conceive where it was all coming from. My teenaged friend Judeline, whose leg was amputated below the knee because of her injuries, says wonderingly, laughing, “Frijolito killed so many people!” Frijolito is the name of the lisping little boy in the Mexican telenovela that everyone was following this time last year. It came on at 5 pm, which is why, according to Judeline, so many people were – unluckily — indoors when the earthquake hit.

Some jokes make their rounds through text messages. As news of cholera broke and the messages about handwashing and water treatment began to spread and enter the popular lexicon, this joke began to circulate via SMS, relying equally on the listener’s familiarity with ubiquitous public health warnings and on the absurdity of that familiar advice when twisted and applied to a piece of equipment:

You can get cholera from your cell phone! To prevent this, scrub your phone well with soap and rinse it with water. If possible, let it soak in a bucket of treated water for at least one hour. If you can’t hear anything after that, give it oral rehydration until it recovers. If it won’t turn on, bury it so that it doesn’t contaminate other phones.

Still another joke plays upon the fact that recent events in Haitian history, when condensed to a list, seem to take on biblical proportions. The particular calamities and the order in which they are listed depend on the speaker (I heard it first from a friend who lost her mother on January 12) but they are always a combination of political events, diseases, and so-called “natural” disasters (which are never entirely natural), and the punch line always remains the same:

Haiti has had nine plagues. The first was AIDS. The second was a coup d’état. The third was Préval. The fourth was another coup d’état. The fifth and sixth were hurricanes Jeanne and Gustav. The seventh was the goudougoudou. The eighth was hurricane Tomas. The ninth was cholera. If you don’t want the tenth plague, don’t vote for Célestin.

Jokes allow people to talk about topics that may be dangerous (politically or psychically or sometimes literally) to discuss directly. Imagining the earthquake as a competition between Jesus and Satan is a way for people, many of whom would never question God directly, to do so obliquely. Leavening stories of earthquake survival with these recognizable moments of humor (the sight of naked neighbors with their hands clasped strategically while the known world collapses, the idea that the cute kid from the telenovela is responsible for the mortality rate) brings the strangeness of the catastrophe back to earth and to reality. Talking about the perils of living under a tarp using Bouki and Ti Malis illustrates vulnerability without naming it aloud; it recognizes and shines a light on the precariousness of the lives of people who not only have to live in tents, but run the risk of losing even that minimal shelter (to thieves or, more likely, to poorly-planned state-sponsored relocation). The joke equating a Célestin presidency to a tenth and final plague is the most dangerous – at once an indictment and warning that Préval’s chosen candidate, Jude Célestin, could be the final straw that breaks this country that has already endured so many unthinkable things.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Not all jokes are political or laden with subtext or half-articulated truths. Sometimes the joke is a form of release from a world that threatens to become unbearable.
The youth writing group I work with meets every Saturday in Pont Rouge, not far from Cité Soleil, where many of the participants live. This past Saturday an American journalist (who, I will add, was kind and patient and seemed to have great integrity) joined us. Marlène , who coordinates the group with me, told this journalist, “If there’s one thing wrong with this group, it’s that they laugh too much, they tell too many jokes.” I can’t disagree — our meetings always start with jokes and teasing, and, if we’re not disciplined, remain irreverent throughout. Normally the writing group is lively and talkative, with plenty of teasing and good-natured argument. We’ve had visitors before, and our group has always welcomed the chance to share their voices with others. In fact, that’s the objective of the group – to share the creativity, potential, and energy of these young people from some of Port-au-Prince’s most stigmatized communities with the larger world. But this Saturday, the participants were withdrawn and reticent. As they say in Creole, they were “lwenn” – far away and thinking of other things.

Then four of the participants performed a text they had written. It began with Assephie out in the hall, narrating in voice-over how full of promise and beauty everything felt at the beginning of January 2010 – a new year in a troubled country that was more stable and calm than it had been in years. Then Andy, on a drum, pounded out the sound of the goudougoudou, and the other performers collapsed to the ground. Marlène began to sing in low, despairing tones, while Assephie emerged, clad in the Haitian flag, her hair in a blue and red kerchief, and then fell to the floor, rocking and wailing.

“Haiti, why are you crying like that? Why are you so sad?” asked Elie, representing the international community.

“How can you tell me not to cry?” demanded Assephie, representing a furious and wounded Haiti. “How can you tell me not to scream, when I think of all my children dead, when I think of everyone taken before they should have gone?”

As the drumbeats rose and fell, some people began wiping away their tears. A couple of the workshop participants, who had lost family in the earthquake, were so shaken that they went into the next room to sob and be consoled. The performance concluded with the other actors lifting up Haiti, saying that they will survive, “put their shoulders together” to sustain themselves, as one says in Creole.

People clapped, and said the piece was beautiful. Then we had to pause because so many people were upset. When things at last calmed down and the group, somewhat dispirited, reconvened, the jokes began. Dénold, who prefers to go by his “artist name” G.Love, got up and addressed the two young women who had been particularly affected by the presentation. “This is especially for you,” he said, and, to cheer them up, as the journalist’s tape continued to record, led the group in a lighthearted call-and-answer poem extolling the virtues of women. Then Elie stood and confidently prefaced, “once you hear this, you won’t be able to stop laughing.” Expecting people’s spirit to be low, he had been saving his piece until after the presentation, and offered it as a kind of a conciliatory gesture. He began to recite a poem of his own devising, which seemed to be a sopping, syrupy love poem, only to reveal in its final line that it was not about his love for a girl but about his love for lam bouyi – boiled breadfruit. And then (why not? It’s not every day you find yourself on Public Radio International) I told a joke that concerns a young man, eager to make a good impression on his new girlfriend’s family, wrongly thinking he’s gotten away with blaming his farts on the dog. By now people were laughing out loud, wiping away tears again.

It felt awkward but true. The journalist had wanted to hear the voices of underrepresented young Haitians, and, this week, a few days before douz janvye, those were their voices: muted, trembling, sad, and joking. It wasn’t exactly a redemptive story. The fact that they were laughing is not necessarily inspirational, hopeful, or soothing. It does not allow us to say, “You see, they’ve still got laughter. Everything is going to be all right in Haiti.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Everything is obviously not all right in Haiti. It is very far from all right. It is facile to assume that laughter is necessarily an expression of happiness. In the words of Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, in General Sun, My Brother: “We blacks joke all the time. When we are suffering, we laugh and make jokes. When we are dying, that is, when we have finished suffering, we laugh, sing, and make jokes.”
Joking can be a way to cope. Joking can be the telling of uncomfortable or hard-to-articulate truths. Joking allows one to assert one’s humanity in what would seem to be impossibly dehumanizing conditions – of saying that despite everything, the speaker is still here, still a person, and still telling a story rather than being dissolved and absorbed into the story. Joking can be an act of defiance and fury, a way of shaking your fist in the face of injustice, of momentarily wresting control from a world that threatens to bend and vanquish you. It is speaking truth to power – a way to laugh at earthquakes, to laugh at politics, to laugh at cholera, to laugh at God, to laugh at death.