What is a Silo?

Silophication is most actively theorized by a person who straddles anthropology, global finance, and journalism: Dr. Gillian Tett, a Cambridge trained anthropologist and US managing editor of the Financial Times. Below I build theory through  categorizing Tett’s use of the term silophication in her financial journalism critical of how regulator’s and banker’s silophication led to an absence of information sharing and the presence of a global financial crisis.

Tett sees the “modern age” as epitomized by tensions between integration and fragmentation. “[W]hile technology is integrating the world in some senses, it is simultaneously creating fragmentation too. Moreover, as innovation speeds up, it keeps creating complex new activities that are only understood by technical ‘experts’ in a silo.” (Tett 2009). Tett provides reasons why silos exist (complexity and professional specification) and implores regulators and bankers to silo-bust through hiring holistic thinking anthropology-like personnel to cross silos and share information.

Tett refers to two mutually reinforcing silos, an intellectual silo epitomized by monological and non-holistic thinking supported by the second structural silo of employment departmental balkanization. She admits to this duality of silos describing “structural silos (ie: departments that do not talk)” and “mental silos (financiers with tunnel vision)” (Tett 2009).

Structural Silos

Tett states that financial regulators, the British Financial Services Authority (FSA), has “increasingly succumbed to a ‘silo’ mentality” (Tett 2008a). They “spend their time ticking boxes, within their allotted silos, rather than take a holistic view of risk” (Tett 2008a). Within these homogenized specialist silos, without “common sense and talk” (Tett 2008b) within or across specific fields, the chances of arriving at disasterous “solutions” increase exponentially. These structural silos are workers’ castes reinforced through “career silos” (Tett 2012a). Tett writes about “career silos” referring to how bankers or regulators remain in those castes, resulting in an absence of silo-transcending, information sharing, and empathy across silos (Tett 2012a).

Structural silos are results of the hierarchical organization of the firm, the spatial arrangement of offices within the firm, and the lack of collaboration within the firm. As Thomas Malaby, Andrew Ross, and other corporate ethnographers have recognized, companies can modify their office cultures and use social technologies to transcend structural silos. Business organization have been known to reject hierarchy in exchange for the semi-lateral flow of information across the firm that comes with heterarchy is analyzed by David Stark. This is often the case in new media firms. As Google, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley companies with their California ideologies have shown, it is possible to institutionalize through space, culture, and practice ways of addressing structural silos. This is de rigueur in new media firms but not so in the financial and federal sectors.

Intellectual Silos

In 2010 emails revealed the extent of the deception and greed within the culture of Goldman Sachs investment bankers and Standard and Poor’s credit raters. Tett refers to these leaked emails as primary documents in her analysis of the mental silos behind the global financial crisis of 2008. She writes, “Their world was also in a strange, geeky silo, into which few non-bankers ever peered” (Tett 2010a). By “geeky silo,” Tett refers to the mental or intellectual silophication that defends proprietary knowledge against boundary breakers.

In another example, Tett expanded her notion of the silo to apply outside of finance and its regulation to describe America and American media as polarizing and tribal (Tett 2011). Tett says that the internet is not helping Americans bridge their tribal silos: “social media, far from bridging these silos, is spawning a new form of cyber-tribalism of its own” (Tett 2011). She continues, “Now that Americans feel free to create their own identity online, they increasingly assume that information should be ‘customised’; and as media companies rush to offer these bespoke services, it becomes easier to retreat into an intellectual silo” (Tett 2011).

The phenomenon of the intellectual silo has been identified by a range of scholars, activists, and anthropologists. Going by the name the “filter bubble” which fosters the “myth of digital democracy,” intellectual silos appear to be reinforced by personalization algorithms and by the innate safety of sameness in risk prone fields of cultural production.

Why Silos?

Complexity and specialization, the result of growth in the knowledge management fields augmented by specific technological competencies, is the reason for the proliferation of task, department, intellectual, and field fragmentation today. Tett claims, “If you look around the world today, it is clear that almost every institution, from the army to the banks, is becoming increasingly complex. That, in turn, is creating a plethora of silos, where specialists beaver away, performing an activity that few outsiders understand. Yet the irony is that while these silos are springing up, we also live with systems that are increasingly interconnected; events on a trading desk or isolated battlefield can send ripples across the world” (Tett 2011b). As social complexity scales up, the silos proliferate and grow dangerously less communicative. In core intelligence industries of modernity, from the military to science, energy production, and finance, the silo curse impacts much of the world’s Western elites and by extension the rest of the world.

Tett explains the process: “This problem is not unique to finance. On the contrary, similar patterns can be found in numerous other areas of the modern world, ranging from science to medicine to energy and manufacturing. For as innovation speeds up in the 21st century, specialists are engaged in highly complex activities in numerous silos, that almost nobody outside that particular silo understands, or even knows about – even though the activity in that silos often has the ability to affect society as a whole. There is thus a bizarre paradox in the 21st century world: namely while the global system is becoming more interconnected in some senses, the level of mental and structural fragmentation remains very intense” (Tett 2010b: 129).

Craft specialization has long been our species’ reaction to increasing social complexity. For logical efficiency as well as the domination of worker’s biopower, hierarchically controlled professionalization has been one solution to the problem of knowledge containment. Employment casuality is one result of such efficiency logic on the human scale. But on the present global scale, and with the increasing dissociation of resources and publics through digital abstractions and its derivatives, unchallenged silos and the logics that support them, appear to be able to create global catastrophes.

Solving Silos?

Tett works for the Financial Times so she is a knowledge worker for financial elites willing to pay exorbitantly to access her pithy writing behind an expense paywall. She is also a social actor who doesn’t want to see her clients create another global financial crisis. For Tett this is the “silo curse” she wants to solve for her clients and because her client’s work impacts the wealth of millions of people, poor and rich (Tett 2009).

Tett provides some evidence that by 2009 certain sectors of finance and financial regulation were embarking on efforts to cure the “silo curse” impacting numerous sectors of modernity: “The problem that military and financial systems alike are grappling with, then, is how to combat tunnel vision; or, more accurately, how to persuade players to recognise how tempting – but also dangerous – it is to operate with a one-track mind” (Tett 2011b).

She applauds companies like Goldman Sachs who “try to ensure that different business silos have ways of watching what each other does” (Tell 2008b). Some regulators, for instance, are employing “macro-prudential surveillance (essentially, a posh word for active, holistic regulation). … [This stresses] the importance of joining up the dots” (Tett 2009). Meanwhile, “asset managers are trumpeting the importance of lateral thought and trying to understand what is happening in seemingly disconnected silos” (Tett 2009). To trump the silo curse, improve regulation, and reduce the prevalence of risking investment, Tett argues that bankers and regulators should “be forced to talk about their business with a wide pool of colleagues, including their immediate silo” (Tett 2008b).

Tett claims that “one of the essential investment challenges today [is to] understand the micro-details of modern silos, but [also] see how the macro-pieces interconnect, in a world that is both highly interconnected and tribal.” (Tett 2009). She looks back to her PhD training in anthropology for the penultimate solution. She proposes the development of “cultural translators”, who can explain what is happening in those silos to everyone else (Tett 2009). Tett is suggesting that anthropologist-like employees could help regulators and bankers translate insights from one department to another. For example, she champions “silo-busters” like Dr. Jim Yong Kim, also an anthropologist, as the president of the World Bank for showing the “power of breaking down the intellectual silos that mar much of the modern world” (Tett 2012b).

She concludes: “So, for my money, a better way to frame the debate is not to call for business leaders to be ethical, but to launch a fight against tunnel vision; call it, if you like, a focus on silo busting, both in terms of how companies organise themselves and how business people think” (Tett 2011b).

Conclusion

Tett identifies two iterations of silophication, one structural and another mental. Silos exist because of the complexities of today’s socio-technical world require professionalization and specialization. Silos need to be solved because they result in bad decisions that negatively impact millions of people. One way to solve the “silo curse” is to employ “cultural translators” who can inform specialized knowledge workers about the big picture of their work.

In my work with media reform broadcasters I identified silos: Inter-firm silos that are similar to structural silos in which departments fail to communicate; Inter-audience silos that are similar to intellectual silos in which television viewers balkanize into affinity groups; and intra-field silos, not addressed in Tett’s silo categorization, that refer to institutions within a single field of cultural production, a social movement for instance, who want to but fail to collaborate because of their silophication.

Financial journalists and media reform broadcasters are using the same opaque term, silophication, to describe similar processes. What is the significance of this shared emergent discourse? A methodological question remains. Tett is both a financial journalist and an anthropologist who is using a term used by the subjects of my research. Building theory requires a meta-language developed from records of an indigenous discourse. What to do when the ethnographic subjects and anthropological theorists share the same theoretical discourse?

Tett, Gillian
2008a The danger of letting ‘group think’ spin out of control. Financial Times, March 28. http://www.ft.com/intl/cmts/s/0/1925d542-fc6a-11dc-9229-000077b07658.html#axzz1u23EtNca

Tett, Gillian
2008b How talking can help cut the risk of a lemming fall, Financial Times May 16. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e040ef72-22df-11dd-93a9-000077b07658.html#axzz1u23EtNca

Tett, Gillian
2009 Waking up to the ‘silo curse’ is far from the end of the problem. Financial Time. October 9. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6d1de780-b469-11de-bec8-00144feab49a.html

Tett, Gillian
2010a E-mail howlers bring murky credit business out of shadows, Financial Times. March 25. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CFwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2Fa9da1aa4-508b-11df-bc86-00144feab49a.html&ei=l7-yT4–FYTRiALn-4ySBA&usg=AFQjCNEWttbIb-CaTyM61YL6Fn9HMKhLEA&sig2=Nh82w8uZk9l8z5-rc8y5WQ

Tett, Gillian
2010b Silos and silences: Why so few people spotted the problems in complex credit and what that implies for the future. Banque de France • Financial Stability Review • No. 14 – Derivatives – Financial innovation and stability • July 2010 121. http://www.banque-france.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/banque_de_france/publications/Revue_de_la_stabilite_financiere/etude14_rsf_1007.pdf

Tett, Gillian
2011 US Tribes and Tribulations, Financial Times, August 5, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9a0ed5ae-be37-11e0-bee9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1uyNOEaac

Tett, Gillian
2011b The tunnel-vision thing, Financial Times, January 28. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/32637b44-28eb-11e0-aa18-00144feab49a.html

Tett, Gillian
2011c  ‘Preventing a repeat of the financial crisis isn’t about more business ethics, argues Gillian Tett; it’s about fewer silos’ Financial Management. April 19. http://www.fm-magazine.com/comment/our-guest/preventing-repeat-financial-crisis-isn%E2%80%99t-about-more-business-ethics-argues-gillian

Tett, Gillian
2012a Hildebrand affair a blow for Europe’s public bodies, Financial Times, January 12. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9c389df0-3d3b-11e1-8129-00144feabdc0.html

Tett, Gillian
2012b Right time for a World Bank renaissance man, Financial Times, March 30, 2012. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9eda0f8e-798c-11e1-8fad-00144feab49a.html

To salvage the discipline Graeber encourages you to abandon building theory from Western philosophy. He provokes you to draw theory from your ethnographic experience. He writes:

Where once we drew our theoretical terms – “totem,” “taboo,” “mana,” “potlatch” – from ethnography, causing Continental thinkers from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre to feel the need to weigh in on the resulting debates, we have now reduced ourselves to the scholastic dissection of terms drawn from Continental philosophy (deterritorialization, governmentality, bare life…) – and nobody else cares what we have to say about them. And honestly, why should they – if they can just as easily read Deleuze, Agamben, or Foucault in the original? (Graeber n.d.)

I respect Graeber’s invective and take the challenge to make theory from ethnographic experience and not the Continental library. But his understanding that there are anthropologists from the West here and indigenous carriers of semiotically rich terms there is odd. The divide of emic discourse and etic analysis is increasingly implausible. His segmenting of the studied indigenous from the Continental scholar is rarely as well defined in 2012 as it was in the days of Boas and Levi-Strauss. For those of us who work with communities globally and reflexively networked into the socio-technical contemporary world, such differences are increasingly slight.

For example, in my work with mediamaking knowledge workers I encounter novel terms and phrases that emerge at the same time from other knowledge workers attempting to understand the same predicament, such as journalists and anthropologists. We are both struggling with the same problems.

The shared present predicament invites reflexive awareness from both anthropological and indigenous as well as etic and emic contexts. Increasingly these two populations draw from the same sources, cross fertilize and crowdsource their preliminary findings, and co-develop novel terminology. A hallowed “taboo”-like term from an ethnography of a Western subject is likely to be similar to the term used by the similarly positioned ethnographer grappling to define the same knowledge problems. For instance, ethnographic reports from work with media makers, bankers, programmers, journalists, bureaucrats, etc. show these communities developing terms, partially based on their own graduate school eductions, that are as theoretically dense as terms anthropologists use to meta-reflect on those very terms.

Considering this, how should we address the complex and loaded discourse that is used by both subjects of ethnography and those whose job it is to interpret those subjects?

AF: Sherry Ortner sent me a link to her article on neoliberalism that opens the online journal you founded and edit, Anthropology of this Century (AOTC), which debuted in 2011. It’s got an awesome title. There are 88 more years in ‘this century.’ This is different from a journal with the same title coming out in 1988, which would necessarily be diachronically focused. So how do you conceptualize AOTC’s predictive focus on the emergent? Do you see its status as an online and open journal in terms of this predictive and emergent capacities?

CS: I find myself wondering what anthropology is going to do THIS century, by contrast with the interesting things it did in the last one. Anthropological theory has been stuck for a while, in my view. We need iconoclasts like Edmund Leach – who said that accumulating cultural descriptions for the sake of it isn’t good enough. Obviously, a handful of articles in AOTC won’t sort out the future of the discipline. But I’m hoping we might help a few colleagues think more clearly about some important questions. As for the open/online format, the main advantage is that AOTC is there for anybody to read, including the many anthropologists who lack easy access to journals and other publications. Our latest issue, which went live last week, has already been looked at by people in 84 countries.

AF: AOTC is mainly composed of reviews of anthropological work. Is this because you’ve found this an important component lacking in the anthropological journalistic sphere or because it lends itself nicely to the online format?

CS: It’s easy to find reviews of anthropology books. Having said this, you’ll almost never find them in London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, etc. And the ones at the back of anthropology journals tend to be short, and are written for specialists. Our reviews are longer than average, a bit more reflective, and we’re basically saying that ANY of them should, in theory, be of interest to ANY anthropologist – as well as to scholars and students from other disciplines. So, for example, you might not especially care about Mongolian shamans, but in the latest AOTC there’s a fascinating article by James Laidlaw (a review of Morten Pedersen’s new book) that should, I think, convince you that they are worth thinking about.

AF: I am probably overdetermining the journal as a form of critique but to me AOTC represents the application of much of our theoretical antagonism against closed and privatized journals. Am I overdetermining this analysis? What is the ideological origins of AOTC in relationship to the present state of academic publishing?

CS: The current academic publishing model doesn’t work very well for anthropology, in my view. Obviously things are going to change in the next few years – perhaps dramatically – because of the internet. Having said this, there are costs involved in supplying outstanding content to readers, regardless of the delivery method. So I think some degree of commercialization or subsidization (which is really hidden commercialization) is inevitable in academic publishing.

AF: I noticed on your online list of publication that you cite your written work at AOTC. You are considering it a legitimate location for publishing. How would you like AOTC to develop as a space for publication for the professionalization of anthropologists?

CS: We are not going to start publishing large numbers of peer reviewed research articles on AOTC, if that’s what you mean. That is a huge amount of work, and we don’t have the institutional backup for it. Our niche, at least for now, is just to comment on research published elsewhere. So to an aspiring anthropologist I would say: you should try to write an important and ambitious book so that we can publish a glowing review of it on ANTHROPOLOGY OF THIS CENTURY.

AF: AOTC’s design is vivid with its playfully bricolaged nomeclature set against its stark black background. It’s an excellent and simple example of stylistic possibilities available for journals online. You must have an excellent team on the design side of things. What’s AOTC’s style logic?

CS: All of the design ideas in AOTC come from one person, the art director, Ed Linfoot. Luckily, he is very, very good at what he does.  The logic is in his brain.

AF: Its a simple one but one of the affordances that internet publishing has over hardcopy publishing is the capacity for fast dialogic commentary and the modeling of a virtual public sphere. As one of the moderators of this blog Savage Minds, I understand the work entailed in moderating commentary but I still find it a necessary component of online writing. Considering this, why don’t you allow comments on the articles?

CS: The question you ask is one that I anticipated. Not only does AOTC not have serious interactivity (e.g. readers’ forums etc.), we don’t even have a letters page! This may seem odd for an online open access journal. But if people want to respond to our articles my advice is that they should stop – think carefully – and then publish a response elsewhere, either on a blog (such as yours), or in an article, or a book. The instant response is in some ways antithetical to scholarship. I’m not a big fan of it, except in the context of research seminars, such as the anthropology seminar we hold on Friday mornings at the LSE. There I can be extremely critical of someone’s ideas but this is followed by us having a drink together, and then lunch, which obviously transforms the whole interaction.

AF: I am sure others might like to replicate your experiment with AOTC. In terms of cultural and social capital what does it take to pull off a journal like this?

CS: You need a lot of friends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAA and other groups, such as SHA, have already prepared and sent strong letters condemning both of these programs to the production companies, networks, and others. Copies of the SAA letters can be found on the SAA website (http://bit.ly/w2MHJM, and http://bit.ly/wzT7IA). The letters provide details on why we are so concerned. Up to this point Spike TV has not responded to the public outcry. Leadership of National Geographic, however, has indicated that, while they are unable to stop the showing tomorrow on such short notice, they will place a disclaimer into the show that speaks to laws protecting archaeological and historic sites.

Read the rest of the post.  While I’m not really surprised that Spike TV is doing something like this, the fact that the folks at Nat Geo even considered this is ridiculous.  If you have updates about this, please share in the comments section.  Thanks to the U of Kentucky grad students, Michael, and everyone else for working to get the word out about this issue.  Definitely no time to be passive when it comes to archaeological, historical, and cultural heritage.

As if Amalgamated couldn’t bear to lose a fraction of a percent of profits by employing a few more than the absolute minimum of bodies they have to, or by storing the merchandise at halfway ergonomic heights and angles. But that would cost space, and space costs money, and money is not a thing customers could possibly be expected to hand over for this service without huffily taking their business elsewhere. Charging for shipping does cause high abandonment rates of online orders, though it’s not clear whether people wouldn’t pay a few bucks for shipping, or a bit more for the products, if they were guaranteed that no low-income workers would be tortured or exploited in the handling of their purchases.

Is it anthropology?  Does that question even matter?  I think there is plenty of relevance here.  The article is worth a read.  But, in regards to anthropology, this article has me wondering whether or not there are anthropologists out there exploring similar issues.  If so, who?  If not, why not?  Another example of a pervasive, everyday issue that anthropologists are in a good position to thoroughly explore.  McClelland’s narrative and discussion is based upon a relatively short stint with the company, and I’d be interested to hear about similar projects, as well as others that are based upon longer-term experience.  Anyway, if any of you Savage Minds out there know of related work, let me know about it in the comments section.  Or, let me know what you think about McClelland’s investigation and article.

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.

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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.