I’ve been rethinking the now-ancient war between Wikipedia and its paper forebearers myself, since I’ve just been asked to write my first encyclopedia article — a strange sensation as a wikipedia contributor! Given the recent outbursts of schadenfreude, I think its time to remember once again why Wikipedia is so utterly superior to physical encyclopedias.

To prepare for writing my encyclopedia entry I went to the library to see what actual encyclopedias look like. I must say I was pleasantly surprised. As a student I spurned encyclopedias as ‘secondary sources’ and plowed through texts. As a result, I have an invaluable knowledge that can’t be duplicated by reading secondary sources, and a keen awareness of how exhausting not using secondary sources is! Reading the high-quality, professionally edited entries in my library’s encyclopedias was an eye-opener and a guilty pleasure — you could learn so much with so little effort! And you don’t have to work as hard untangling the entries the way you do with Wikipedia!

But this is exactly the problem with closed, for-profit encyclopedias: they require no work. In fact, they require just the opposite: submission to authority. The writing guidelines for my encyclopedia entry insist that there be no quotations or citations — just a short list of additional readings. Encyclopedias give us no reason to believe their claims are true except the arbitrary authority of those who write them. They are the ultimate triumph of the authoritarian impulse in academics.

Compare this to Wikipedia, which has gotten so persnickety about insisting on citations and references that much of the charm of its early days has gone. Every wikipedia entry is an argument between its composers, spilling out of the discussion page and into the entry. Accuracy and verifiablity are there on the page to see. In other words, Wikipedia is the ultimate realization of academic ideals of argumentation, presentation of evidence, probing claims to logical coherence, and the deliberative use of reason. There is no better place for people to cut their teeth on the life of the mind, or to begin to learn the fundamental skill of close and critical reading of a text.

It is this refusal of arbitrary authority that really scares encyclopedia types, not worries about accuracy. Wikipedia is a place where you must learn to think for yourself, encyclopedias are places where you are told what to believe.

Of course, there is a lot to like about the arbitrary exercise of authority if you have faith in the authority in question: the gullible are not duped, the conspiracy theorists are silenced, and the trains run on time. The down side of intellectual debate is the possibility of intellectual chaos — and there’s certainly a lot of that on Wikipedia! If you are pessimistic about the capacities of your students to know and learn then feeding them the party line is, to you at least, the best way to protect them.

But we as educators can and must believe that our students — and everyone else! — is capable of more than this. Our fundamental principles and highest aspirations lead us ineluctably to the conclusion that attaining intellectual maturity requires immersion in the rough waters of public debate, which is exactly what Wikipedia is. The real danger of Wikipedia is its use by people made gullible by a system which promises them that someone, somewhere knows The Truth, exactly the belief that college teachers try to educate their students out of rather than into. We’d have less uncritical reading of Wikipedia if there were less people trained to be uncritical readers.

Oh and did I mention the massively larger coverage, the instant updating, the self correction, and the ease of consultation that Wikipedia possess? Or the sheer charm of Wikipedia: when was the last time you read an encyclopedia entry on death by elephant, Cardassia, or chicken sexing?

Wikipedia is flawed, human, complex, and ultimately deeply worthwhile. It is real life, not a child-proof playroom. What sort of educators are we if we believe the latter is better for our students than the former?

The other side of the ‘can’ question is one of publicity: behind closed doors someone somewhere within the AAA may be giving the nod to whatever lobbiest we are allied with to oppose (or support) the AAA. Do they have the integrity to tell their membership what they are doing in our name? I am guessing that the answer is ‘no’, simply because any sort of public statement of this sort of back room dealing would immediately raise questions about proper procedure at AAA, which is exactly the topic these informal dealings are attempting  to avoid.

So: can the AAA successfully, publicly, and in a timely fashion announce a policy decision it has made or will we have to wait 8 months for the next AAA meetings and a DOA panel entitled something like ‘HR 3699:  An Important Topic Having To Do With $This_Year’s_Conference_Theme_Branding”?

I’m hopeful, but I’m not holding my breath.

Now imagine one day you wake up, get in your car, and find a toll booth at the entrance to your local freeway or artery.

“What’s going on?” you ask.

“The government recently passed a law making it illegal for government agencies to allow you to use public works just because you’ve paid the taxes that create them,” says the attendant at the toll booth.

“That’s crazy,” you say.

“I guess they were worried that all of the contractors would go out of business if people just used roads funded by federal money.”

“Is it like a jobs thing, like they’re afraid all the construction guys are going to be out of a job if the government doesn’t step in? Like to protect the economy?”

“On the contrary,” the attendant says, “all of the construction workers are volunteers, from the guy operating the backhoe to the surveyors. It’s the accountants and CEOs in the back office who are earning salaries, and they’re raking in millions every year.”

It seems impossible, right? But if you replace roads with journals, you pretty much get the picture of what house bill 3699 will do: it will make it impossible for government agencies to mandate that you have the right to read the research that you as a tax payer have already paid for.

Actually, it gets stranger than that. Today we live in a world where we drive on roads mostly for free, but most government-funded research is behind a toll booth. HR 3699 is not designed to keep us from enjoying what we already rightfully are using every day, it is designed to make sure that the toll booths don’t get taken off the road.

The logic used by its proponents is even more bizarre: they are afraid that the roads (journals) will become unsafe and dangerous unless we continue to subsidize the salaries of the small number of back-office people who do very little of the work of producing journals but make all of the money.

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

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

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

It’s not clear to me that HR3699 will get very far in the legislative process but the sooner we academics start pushing back against craziness like this the better, especially given the conflict about SOPA that is on the horizon.

[R]esolving the complex challenges that confront our nation and the world requires more than expertise in science and technology. We must also educate individuals capable of meaningful civic participation, creative expression, and communicating insights across borders. The potential for graduates in any field to achieve professional success and to contribute significantly to our economy depends on an education that entails more than calculus.

Curricula expressly tailored in response to the demands of the workforce must be balanced with opportunities for students to develop their capacity for critical thinking, analytical reasoning, creativity, and leadership—all of which we learn from the full spectrum of disciplines associated with a liberal arts education. Taken together with the rigorous training provided in the STEM fields, the opportunities for exploration and learning that Gov. Scott is intent on marginalizing are those that have defined our national approach to higher education.

M.S. argues that Crow’s statement is “a solid response,” but that something more is needed: “What it lacks are rhetorical oomph and concrete examples.”  So what can provide that extra OOMPH and rhetorical power?  Actual examples of anthropologists putting their training and knowledge to work:

Some of the best analysis of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and of the ongoing follies on Wall Street these days, has been produced by the Financial Times‘ Gillian Tett. Ms Tett began warning that collateralised debt obligations and credit-default swaps were likely to lead to a major financial implosion in 2005 or so. The people who devise such complex derivatives are generally trained in physics or math. Ms Tett has a PhD in anthropology.

M.S. then links to a 2008 profile of Tett by the Guardian’s Laura Barton.  Here’s a key selection that quotes Tett speaking about how she put her anthropology background to work:

“I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,” she reasons. “Firstly, you’re trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.”

The Economist article ends with a little chiding of our dear Governor Scott, saying that it’s never too late to learn, and that maybe he should take a course or two in anthropology for good measure.  He could, of course, just ask his daughter.  Sorry, I couldn’t help that one.

The broader point here is about liberal arts education, society, and anthropology.  Interestingly, what a lot of this comes down to is a perceived clash between SCIENCE and other perspectives that are, according to some, less worthwhile and meaningful.  If you take a look at the comments section for the article, you’ll see evidence of this version of events (some comments mention the supposed division in anthropology about the whole “science” issue).  The basic argument for folks who make this sharp science vs humanities division is that the former is useful and important to society (because it supposedly produces jobs directly) and the latter is nice, but not really all that necessary.  I think Rex did a pretty good job of explaining why a well rounded liberal arts education does indeed, matter.  And he used Thomas Jefferson’s words to do it.  Nice work, Rex.

So what does Gillian Tett add to the picture?  I think she’s an excellent example because her work illustrates what anthropology can bring to the table when it comes to everyday processes and behaviors that get taken for granted.  Economics is just one area where anthropology has a lot to add to the discussion–the discipline has a deep history of empirical and theoretical research on human economic systems (Malinowski was, after all, questioning arguments about “Economic Man” way back in the 1920s).  Business, finance, and economics are all issues that get a lot of attention, day in and day out, from the general public, politicians, and pundits.  The financial crash of 2008 has made these issues even more important.

But if you look at a lot of business and economics and finance books, theories, and models, there’s a lot missing.  History is one key ingredient, as Jason Antrosio argues.  A recent article called “Economics has met the enemy, and it is economics” points to other glaring issues in the discipline.  Anthropology is certainly well-placed to contribute to a rethinking of economics…in theory and actual practice.  There are, in fact, lots of economic anthropologists doing just that.  It would be nice to see more of their names in the pages of publications like The Economist, for starters.

But there’s another important point here.  In their 2011 book Economic Anthropology, Chris Hann and Keith Hart write, “The project of economics needs to be rescued from the economists.  Economic anthropology, in dialog with neighboring disciplines, as well as with more flexible economists, could be part of that process of intellectual reconstruction” (2011: 162).  Hart also argues that anthropological critiques and contributions to economics have to move beyond simply bashing on individual economists or the discipline as a whole:

It is convenient to beat up on the economists, but I wouldn’t be an economic anthropologist if I didn’t believe in the historical project of economics which has been debased by the economists, especially in the last half- century. We should not allow our disgust with the blatantly ideological uses of neoclassical economics in producing undemocratic outcomes in our societies to lead us to discount the marginalist revolution (Hutchinson 1978) which launched modern economics in its present form. We should remember that economics was the first social discipline to introduce a subjective theory of value. There are all kinds of problems with this particular theory, especially its reliance on prices as a proxy for value. Nevertheless, it provoked and encouraged some of the most progressive social thought that we still rely on today, such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Talcott Parsons and others (Hart 2011: 7).

What this means to me is that increased engagement from anthropologists requires something more than just critique.  It requires actual participation in debates, and well-argued contributions.  For me, this is a crucial point, and it applies across the board.  Anthropologists can and should add to wider, more public debates about issues like economics–and other critical subjects such as race, culture, human nature, and so on.  Jason Antrosio makes this case pretty powerfully in a recent post about how a critically informed and yet morally optimistic anthropology can challenge many contemporary economic assumptions.  Absolutely.

I appreciate Antrosio’s combination of critical anthropology with the morally optimistic arguments of Michel-Rolf Trouillot.  In his 2001 book “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value,” David Graeber makes a similar argument when he balances the relentless criticism of Marx with the moral optimism of Marcel Mauss (Graeber 2001: 255-56).  Unending critique, Graeber argues, can lead to “a picture of the world so relentlessly bleak that in the end, criticism itself comes to seem pointless” (2001: 256).  Hann and Hart focus their argument on the idea of interdisciplinary dialog and–the part that I find most appealing–intellectual reconstruction, rather than critique alone.  Teaching, as Alex Golub and many others point out, is a fundamental part of that reconstructive project.

Politicians such as Governor Scott wave the banners of science and technology in the name of producing jobs.  Scott seems particularly enamored with engineering, technology, and mathematics.  Anthropology, which is uniquely positioned between the so-called hard sciences and the humanities, can illustrate the fact that science does matter.  Engineering matters.  Physics and biology matter.  Mathematics is indeed important.  The larger point here is that it’s not an either/or choice that we need to make.  Science is fundamentally important…but that’s not all we need.  Economists, for example, love to spend their time with numbers, statistics, and complex models. What anthropologists can add to the discussion is not just a critical assessment of how such models play out on the ground, but also what those numbers actually mean in particular social, cultural, political, and geographic contexts.

Anthropologists can add to these discussions through teaching, and through their research.  The main objective is to find ways to share such discussions about both of these aspects of the discipline with wider audiences–and to do this in creative, dynamic, informative, and challenging ways.  The best counter to ill-informed, instrumentalist arguments against liberal arts education, social science, and anthropology is, as the post on The Economist blog illustrates, with concrete evidence.  The proof, the saying goes, is in the anthropological pudding–all the way from Franz Boas to Gillian Tett.

References

Graeber, David.  2001.  Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value.  New York: Palgrave.

Hann, Chris, and Keith Hart.  2011.  Economic Anthropology.  Malden: Polity Press.

Hart, Keith.  2011.  Building the human economy: a question of value?  Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society.

The ‘liberal arts’ are called that for a reason: they are the skills and ideas that are appropriate for free people. Back in ancient Rome that meant: people who are not slaves. Today it means: people who have the skills necessary to govern themselves and undertake the collective effort of steering our republic.

Education for citizenship is a unique challenge because the world is a uncertain place, and solving the problems we face as a country is not like learning a recipe or performing rote work. Who knew on September 10th, 2001 that terrorism rather than economic globalization would shape our future? Who in 2008 could predict that domestic economic policy rather than foreign policy would come back into focus? In a world where our lives are open to fortune, citizens need to learn how to think, not what to think — and that is the heart of a liberal arts education.

Anthropology is central to a liberal arts education for several reasons, the least of which is the empirical record of human behavioral diversity it provides and the way our unique fieldwork method cultivates the researcher’s ability to understand and imagine human life. But really, the problem is not proving that anthropology is worthwhile, it is helping people understand that our job as educators is to make human beings, not workers.

Of course, you don’t need to get a fancy degree to become a cultivated and intelligent person. After all, all of us know people who have got their degree from the school of hard knocks. In fact some of the smartest and most cultivated people I know are the men I’ve met in Papua New Guinea who have honed their skills of persuasion and politics through endless years of pig exchanges, marriages, and peace-making ceremonies — people so astute that they put our current crop of US politicians to shame, but who have never learned to read or even pick up a pen or pencil.

Nevertheless, a college education is uniquely valuable in today’s world because the type of learning it provides is especially suited to our form of democratic governance. But don’t take it from me, take it from one of the founders of our country: Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson believed in state-funded higher education because he thought an educated citizenry was central to democracy. “wherever the people are well informed,” he wrote Richard Price in 1789, “they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.” It is for this reason that he wanted students at UVA to study everything from botany to Greek literature to the fine arts — a liberal education which would “form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others and of happiness within themselves.”

Jefferson was also, incidentally, the first American anthropologist. Although we had no degrees by that name to give away at the time, his written works such as the Notes On The State of Virginia are widely considered (or were, when I was educated) to be the first examples of anthropology’s holistic, particularistic viewpoint. Excavating fossils and making notes on the climate, soil, and lifestyle of the people of the state, Jefferson was an early proponent of four-field anthropology.

You can read his notes and a summary of his ethnological opinions online for free because they have been made open for access to all because in America we believe the diffusion of knowledge to be a good in itself — something else we have to thank Thomas Jefferson for. In this way anyone can chose to educate themselves about our country’s past — something that Rick Scott may not have had an opportunity to do when he was in college.

Once upon a time, we called people ‘conservative’ because they were trying to conserve our traditional values. These days it is the defenders of the liberal arts, the ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ who must remind them what our country used to stand for: liberty and progress.

One last thing: the funny thing about producing people who are free to think for themselves is that they can do a lot of other things to: learn new job skills, start new businesses, or even invent new industries. Holding fast to your values and doing what is important, rather than what is urgent, often has unexpected and gratifying consequences. It is for this reason that Thomas Jefferson thought that “knowledge is power, that knowledge is safety, that knowledge is happiness.”

We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on, those types of degrees, so when they get out of school, they can get a job.

Daniel Lende provides a good recap of the situation and some of the reactions with this mega-linked, all inclusive post.  Jason Antrosio has also weighed in on the matter–his post also includes a link to the AAA response, which is here.  Jason sees this as an opportunity to rally anthropologists:

Not only does this give anthropology an opportunity to emphasize our scientific side, it could also be a rallying point for social science and humanities disciplines that were equally dismissed. It seems worth mentioning that while Scott dismisses everyone except math-science-engineering, it is at a time when other countries are seeking the lifelong thinking and creativity developed in a Liberal Arts education.

In another piece, John Hawks discusses some of the possible avenues for responding to this debacle.  How can or should anthropologists make their case?  He writes:

It’s very difficult to come up with a rapid and effective reply from an organization or department, so I understand these aren’t as punchy as they might be. Still, it seems to me a vastly more effective response would describe the economic impact of anthropologists in Florida, the dollar amounts of federal and private grants they bring to Florida universities, their role as custodians of natural and cultural history, and their history of engagement with indigenous and immigrant peoples in the state.

One of Scott’s underlying arguments is that anthropology doesn’t produce JOBS, and this is an argument that seems to get a lot of mileage by certain folks who aren’t exactly fans of social science (Tom Coburn, anyone?).  I am going to leave off with a few questions for all you Savage Minds out there: What do you think about this tactic of using jobs as the sole calculus for measuring the value of a discipline?  Should anthropologists be completely focused on producing jobs, or are there other elements that matter in a valuable and worthwhile education?  What about the value of teaching students how to think critically and holistically about the world around them?  Why say you, readers?

What the reader discovers, however, is that Fried will continue to announce what he’s about to do right to the end: “Later on in this book I shall examine . . . ”; “I shall discuss both of these after considering . . . ”; “I shall also be relating. . . . ” Fried’s brilliance, however, is that in spite of all the time spent looking ahead and harking back he also — and it’s this that I want to emphasize here — finds the time to tell you what he’s doing now, as he’s doing it: “But again I ask . . . ” ; “Let me try to clarify matters by noting . . . ”; “What I want to call attention to. . . . ” But that’s not all: the touch of genius is that on top of everything else he somehow manages to tell you what he is not doing (“I am not claiming that . . . ”), what he has not done (“What I have not said . . . ”) and what he is not going to do (“This is not the place for . . . ”).

Fried does seem to be exceptional in his love of these conventions. Deyer says “Fried is at once its high camp apotheosis and its disintegration into mere manner.” But I still am bothered by Deyer’s claim that such writing is “self-­worshiping — or, more accurately, self-­serving.” I say this because in graduate school I was continually accused of failing to adequately sign-post my work. As such I was socialized into this particular norm of academic writing. Is it “self-worshiping” and “self-serving” to conform to professional norms?

Part of the reason I started blogging was to have a platform where I could write about academic issues in a voice which feels more properly “my own.” I don’t consider myself a great writer or a great stylist, but I do strive for clarity and brevity. What I’ve noticed about some of the anthropologists who are considered great stylists is that they seem to say the same thing over and over in different ways (or using slightly different examples). I can see how this makes it easier for readers to grasp an idea, but conditioned as I am to reading texts very closely, I tend to find it annoying. This is one reason I prefer journal articles to books. But with all the pressure to churn out book after book, I don’t really blame academic authors for adopting whatever strategy works best for them: excessive sign-posting, repeating the same point over and over, going off on tangents, etc. Perhaps Fried deserves such scorn, I don’t know, but I wonder if it is fair to blame “self-worship”?

[Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the Twitter discussion which led to this post.]

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.

To ANACREON in Heav’n, where he sat in full Glee,
A few Sons of Harmony sent a Petition,
That He their Inspirer and Patron wou’d be;
When this Answer arriv’d from the JOLLY OLD GRECIAN
“Voice, Fiddle, and Flute,
“No longer be mute,
“I’ll lend you my Name and inspire you to boot,
“And, besides, I’ll instruct you like me, to intwine
“The Myrtle of VENUS with BACCHUS’s Vine.

As any musician can tell you, the sprightly waltz-like tempo of the drinking song (as well as lines where you can grow across the phrase breaks) make it much better than the plodding, pathos-filled renditions our anthem is regularly subjected to.

As an old-fashioned analog — indeed, instrumentless — musician, I’m skeptical of claims that digital technology enable remix. What could be simpler than simply raising your voice in song? In fact, what I find so terrifying about our current copyright regimes is that they take place in the middle of a sociotechnical system where it is possible to criminalize all unmonetized semiosis. The national anthem helps remind us of the time when copyright and our country started more or less simultaneously: the Statute of Anne and the declaration of Independence were written within a lifetime of each other.

Call it remix, diffusion, rentextualization, or what will you — America’s strength is it’s ability to aid and abet variety. I’m not sure how the semiotically complex act of white guys dressed up as Native Americans dumping a South Asian beverage ingredient into the ocean got turned into a rallying call for ethnoreligious populist homogeneity, but I’m pretty sure it involves ignoring most of the cross-cultural connections which made the event possible. Indeed, as Ralph Linton reminded up over a half century ago, there is nothing more thoroughly remixed than being “100% American”:

Our solid American citizen awakens in a bed built on a pattern which originated in the Near East but which was modified in Northern Europe before it was transmitted to America. He throws back his covers made of cotton (domesticated in India), linen (domesticated in the Near East) or silk (discovered in China). All of these materials have been spun and woven by processes invented in the Near East. He puts on his slippers (adapted from moccasins invented by Indians in the Eastern woodlands) and goes to his bathroom, whose fixtures are a mixture of European and American inventions, both of recent date. He takes off his pajamas (a garment invented in India) and washes with soap (invented by the ancient Gauls).

He puts on garments whose form was derived originally from the skin clothing of the nomads of the Asiatic steppes. His shoes are made from skins tanned by a process invented in ancient Egypt and cut into a pattern derived from classical civilizations of the Mediterranean. He ties a strip of brightly colored cloth around his neck, which is a survival from the shoulder shawls worn by 17th-century Croatians. Before going out to breakfast, he glances through his window (made of glass invented in Egypt). If it is raining, he puts on overshoes (made of rubber discovered by the Central American Indians) and takes an umbrella (invented in southeastern Asia). On his head, he puts a hat made of felt (a material invented in the Asiatic steppes).

On his way to breakfast, he stops to buy a paper, paying for it with coins (an ancient Lydian invention). At the restaurant, a whole new series of borrowed elements confronts him. His plate is made from a type of pottery invented in China. His knife is of steel (an alloy first made in southern India). His fork is a medieval Italian invention, and his spoon is a derivative of a Roman original. He begins his breakfast with an orange (originally from the eastern Mediterranean), a cantaloupe (from Persia), or perhaps a piece of African watermelon. With this, he has coffee (from an Abyssinian plant) with cream and sugar. (Both the domestication of cows and the idea of milking them originated in the Near East, while sugar was first made in India.) After his fruit and first coffee, he goes on to waffles (cakes made by a Scandinavian technique from wheat domesticated first in Asia Minor). Over these he pours maple syrup (invented by Indians of the eastern woodlands). As a side dish, he may have an egg (from a species of bird first domesticated in Indo-China) or thin strips of bacon (flesh of an animal domesticated in Eastern Asia which has been salted and smoked by a process developed in Northern Europe).

When our friend has finished eating, he settles back to smoke (an American Indian habit). Tobacco was domesticated in Brazil. Indians from Virginia smoked it in a pipe, while the cigarette was derived from Mexico. The cigar was transmitted to us from the Antilles by way of Spain. While smoking, he reads the news of the day (printed in characters invented by ancient Semites on material invented in China by a process invented in Germany). As he absorbs the accounts of foreign troubles, he will (if he is a good conservative citizen) thank a Hebrew deity in an Indo-European language that he is “100% American.”

Happy Fourth of July!

Let’s start here:

I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds.

Yes. Next?

My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love.

Wait. What? Why is technology narcissistic? Although he starts out talking about his “sexy” BlackBerry Bold, he really means Facebook. One is a piece of hardware, the other a piece of social software accessed via that device. If, for the time being, we assume that Facebook is narcissistic, does that mean that all technology is narcissistic? What is narcissistic about a telephone, a device which allows you to speak to other people? Sure, your conversations may be about yourself, but that’s because you’re narcissistic, not because your telephone is.

But let’s give Franzen the benefit of the doubt. He isn’t making a deterministic argument, but a softer argument about how technology subtly influences us. The nub of his arguments seems to be that the technology’s sexiness facilitates narcissism.

Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us.

There is some truth to the claim that all consumer products are designed to reflect well on their owners. At least the designers of those products want us to make that connection, and it is important to some people, but I’ve never been convinced that it is as widespread a connection as designers and advertisers would like us to believe. I think the opposite is true as well: people tend to reflect themselves back on whatever technology they happen to own. Still, let’s give this one to Franzen. But again he slips from the sexiness of the phone to the sexiness of the Facebook interface… (Does anyone actually think the Facebook GUI is sexy?).

Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us.

It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

Speak for yourself kiddo. I friend people on Facebook because they are my students, colleagues, research collaborators, high school classmates, etc. In other words, for a whole lot of varied reasons. I certainly don’t think of it as a private hall of flattering mirrors. But OK, I like it when people “like” my photos, glib comments, and the links I share. I get my little shot of dopamine. Sure. But so do I when someone gives me encouragement at work, or says something especially nice on a student evaluation form. If Facebook is any different it is because I get to give and receive such encouragement to a much wider social network than those I encounter daily at work. The very opposite of narcissism.

But I suspect that most people e-mailing, liking, and tweeting the article (oh, the irony) do so because of the next section:

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

OK. Hold on a second. Are you saying that being phony is purely a product of the “techno-consumerist order”? Read some Erving Goffman. Please! Everyday life is full of various degrees of self-presentation. This is true of all societies, living under all levels of technological development. Tell me that being “cool, attractive, in-control” wasn’t important for pre-internet Balinese! Does that mean that they were incapable of love? How about writing letters, or (dare I say it?) novels? How is carrying around a Franzen paperback any less a part of the techno-consumerist order?

But all this isn’t what pissed me off. No. What really pissed me off was the last bit. The bit about birdwatching.

And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.

Because now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.

Well, you know what? When you keep lists of birds you are using technology. Yes, keeping lists is a type of technology – one of the oldest in fact. But we’ve moved beyond that. Here’s a small list of some current technologies which might help you with your birdwatching. And you know what else? These technologies might even help the birds.

Professors are in many ways middle management and like Michael we have our own small captive audiences that we play to. Our little pronouncements can give us a small sense of power, and we specialize in making others jump through our hoops. It’s for this reason that I found Scott’s behavior so atrocious. Positions of authority give one the opportunity to do less when they obligate you to do more, to be more indulgent of one’s desire to feel potent when one should be more selfless about what you can do for others.

I’m sure we’ve all met teachers like Michael Scott — in fact I’m sure our students see more than a little Michael Scott in our own behavior from time to time. While I did eventually come to like The Office (or at least the first couple of seasons) I still come away from every episode thinking: ‘note to self: do better than that’. There has been a lot of wild speculation in the press about whether the show can go on without Carrell, but I am sure of one thing: whoever they get to fill his shoes will not do as much to remind us of sound pedagogy as he did. Adieu, cautionary tale extraordinaire.

Plus, there might be a big fat cathedral anthem in it for us as well. For those of us not laboring under a millennia of an oppressive class system, what’s not to like?

January 12, 2010 was a beautiful day. It had been the fourth day in a series of such beautiful days, sunny but not too hot with a cool breeze that gained strength in the evenings, ensuring a set of restful nights. Early that morning, I left the house I shared with a friend and fellow anthropologist and a Haitian couple in the middle-class neighborhood of Lalue, and made my way to Bel Air, an impoverished neighborhood in the center of Port-au-Prince. I had been visiting Bel Air for some four years now to study why their concentration of Carnival performance associations, known as bann a pye (literally, “bands on foot”), had gotten so involved in community politics. Since 2004, they had been attempting to transform their associations into recognized civic organizations in order to stake claims on the multiple agencies that performance governance in Haiti, from governmental ministries to NGOs. They characterized their demands for funds for their performances and for the various social projects they executed in the community as a means of holding those who govern accountable to the standards of respect and equality they sought in and by democracy. That morning I was headed to Bel Air because a group of ti bann, “small bands,” was holding a meeting in order to strategize a plan to get the mayor’s office to recognize them as real bands. This was the first of two such meetings I had scheduled that day, and the only one I would finish.

I was awaiting the second one when, at 4:53 PM, the earth started to shake. I was in the best of possible places—in an open courtyard with only the bright sky and some clouds overhead. I was seated at a round table in the back of an old, wooden, French colonial house that had been converted into the mayor’s cultural offices and an outdoor restaurant and performance space that hosted weekend concerts. Claude, the representative of the Federation of Bann a Pye, and I were awaiting the start of a planning session of the Carnival Committee. Unlike other days, when the committee met around a wooden table inside the house, everyone gathered outside today. From the looks of it, people just wanted to take advantage of the soft sunlight with a cool beer at the bar. Agreeing, the committee chair soon told us that we’d just meet outside today. But we did not hurry to gather the tables together. Claude and I continued to debate about whether or not the mayor’s office would be able to verify that the bands had actually performed the past Sunday, their first scheduled performance of the year. He was telling me how the office hadn’t followed through on their plan to send scouts to check on the bands when a train, or so I had first thought, passed under my feet. Within seconds, I locked eyes with Claude. As the vibrations intensified, voices began to fill the air: “Tremblement de Terre,” Earthquake! Earthquake!

Within seconds of the first trembles, Claude corrected my instincts, honed by a Midwest childhood of tornado drills. He grabbed me from heading toward the patio—whose awning would soon collapse on a young man’s leg—and pulled me into the courtyard. The sharp waves of earth jerked me to the ground and my glasses from my head. I landed before a palm tree. For the next twenty seconds I tried, in terrified silence, to hold the ground with both hands and settle it as though it were a hysterical child. I don’t remember the moment the earth did settle. But I recall Claude telling me to get up. I found my glasses; and then the urgency overwhelmed me. The awning left the man with a shinbone popped through his skin. He had started to cry. His “Amwe,” Help! Help! meshed with those echoing in the street beyond the courtyard’s padlocked steel barricade. A suffocating smell of gas spread from the propane vendor next door. And there was no way to get out.

Two men picked up rocks from the stone floor of the courtyard and began to pound against the padlock that secured the door of the yard’s steel barricade. The man with the broken leg was now bleeding profusely. I ran up to him and told him that we’d find help once we got to the street. We all covered our mouths to ward off the smell of gas, and yelled to those in the street not to light up a cigarette. I believed at this point that it was only here where things shook, and that the barrier would open to reveal the street as it had always been. And I don’t think I was alone in this thought. Once the padlock broke open, the crowd of men pushed each other through the narrow entrance as though we were fleeing a fire. But the street brought no solace. It too was gone.

I remember the huddles of young women from a nearby professional school covered in dust and blood, and screaming about the others still inside the collapsed school building; and the woman who held a dead teenage girl whose head was smashed. There was also a woman with a sheet around her naked body, having fled from a shower. She exposed her nakedness to rip off a piece of the cloth so we could make a tourniquet for the man with the broken leg. We did, knowing he would lose this leg, and then sat next to him, listening to his cries. For each motorcycle that passed I asked the driver to take the bleeding man to the hospital. But their faces seemed to say that each was going to check on wives, kids, mothers, siblings, cousins, friends, houses, and so on. Then Félix, the mototaxi driver, who worked on the corner where I lived, rode by us. Each morning Félix and I exchanged the same banter; he asking me to take a ride and I retorting, “I don’t want to die today; maybe tomorrow, but today I got too much to do.” I thought of the oddness of this joke, as my desire to live now frightened me. Félix took the man on the back of his moto. I had no idea where he was heading. But with them out of sight, I began to head home, dragging my feet down this tiny side street filled with loss, terrified of what lay beyond.

When I reached Lalue, the first cross street and the road to my house, I stopped. It was then that I realized—with buildings tilted, cracked, and in piles of rubble; streams of people covered in soot running frantically; and a long line of stopped cars filled with panicked faces—the magnitude of what had happened. I started to run up the hill, falling once over a concrete block.

The first thing I saw as I rounded the corner to my house was the blood-filled shirt of the woman who lived above me. She was running toward me to tell me that my roommate was still under our collapsed house. After a half hour or so (an hour and a half after the quake), our neighbors managed to free her from the rubble of our house. They laid her on her back in the middle of the street in front of the second floor of our house, which had fallen intact to the ground, sinking the first floor into the foundation like a jack in the box. We all spent that night staring into space, listening to the cries of a woman whose son was buried beneath the house across the street, and a man who had lost three of his brothers and two of his children in the house next to hers.

***

At this moment, I had no idea that Bel Air would see more damage than much of the city, or that fourteen of the people I had come to call friends were dead, including a man and his girlfriend who insisted on throwing me a going away party when I made a short trip to the States earlier that year. I had told him I’d be back in no time, but he claimed, like a good anthropologist, that you can’t leave without the proper ritual—a rooftop party with a bottle of rum, a cake, and a stereo hooked up to a live wire dangling overhead, blasting a steady stream of djazz and rap kreyòl that got me dancing and forty people amused. I had no idea that this rooftop had caved in that day, crushing him, his girlfriend, and members of their families as they watched, in a tiny room below, the loop of music videos that they had been watching that day, like all days.

But my ignorance was not for the reasons that kept my family and friends abroad from knowing that I was alive—the fall of all three cellular carriers’ signals. I did not need to call. I could walk there. But I was too scared to leave to check on them. Scared of stepping out alone; and scared of what I’d find. What I did know was that, if they had survived, they would not have access to the kinds of provisions that we would find where I lived, in this middle class area where people were always prepared to spend a few days inside—prepared, that is, for dezòd (meaning disorder but also, and above all, violence)—as they had done, in 2008, when food riots broke out, or before the quake, when students were protesting the shuttered medical school. These were the kinds of everyday inequalities that I had learned to navigate as a white, foreigner researcher and they now paralyzed me.

When I finally made it to the U.S. Embassy two days later, after my landlord had hunted down enough gas to get us there, such inequalities met me in sharp relief. With IDs buried beneath rubble, our white skin got us through the barricades that would keep so many Haitian Americans out. I was there because my roommate needed to see a doctor. We were to go back to the city. But by the time she was done, and told that despite her shockingly bruised body, she was not to be “medivaced,” our ride had already left. I believe this was my landlord’s way of telling us to go home, home to where home was. We took the advice and stayed. For two days I translated documents for Haitian parents or relatives who would be transporting children to their country of citizenship—the country where they, the parents or relatives of these children, could not stay. And then, a coastguard plane with these children, their escorts, and pregnant Haitian American women flew us to Santo Domingo, and a day later a Jet Blue flight, filled with tourists who, at their resorts in the Dominican Republic, did not feel but a tremble.

It was not until seven months later that I would visit Bel Air, and see that it was hit harder than I ever could have surmised from the reports, in the news or from friends, of its destruction. I was there to attend a meeting of the Federation of Bann a Pye, for they were planning a festival to commemorate the earthquake and to showcase the songs of Carnival 2010 that never saw the crowds. When I arrived with a cake and some rum, the director of the federation handed me two folders of photos and notes that they had collected for me when they heard my house had collapsed and had thought I had lost my notes. Enclosed were the photos I had given them as gifts and some they had taken; drawings of their bands’ flags; lists of band members; transcriptions of songs; and invitations to performances, press conferences, and protests. They said they had heard from my friend and research assistant that another friend had gone to my house and recovered most of my fieldnotes and my computer from my desk (which had miraculously sunk into the foundation with only minor scratches), but they wanted me to have these things anyway. One of the bandleaders took me aside after the meeting ended and told me that he has a lot of respect for me because he knows that I came here to do something, and that, as he said, “You will do what you have for you to do” (w ap fè sa ou gen pou ou fè). A call for accountability and respect, meant to motivate the continuation of that which they do and that which I do, after all.