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

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

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

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

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

Scanning

I spend too much time doing this. The dopamine hit one gets from finding something new is immediate and gratifying. I have my email, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. each of which is sending me a steady stream of new links. (Follow our SavageMinds Twitter feed or Facebook account for the results of this time-wasting activity.) I check all of them throughout the day. Especially Twitter.

One of my favorite ways to browse all this in one place (excluding Google+ for now, but I’m sure that will change) is Flipboard for iOS. Google tried to buy Flipboard and when they failed made their own app called Currents. Currently Flipboard is still way ahead of the Google, as well as other competitors like Pulse, Zite, etc. (Here is a post from Lifehacker reviewing several of the options.)

To make the best use of Flipboard, you want to group your favorite Twitter sources into “lists” so that each list can have it’s own magazine on Flipboard. I haven’t been doing a great job of updating my various lists, but you can see mine here (or post your own in the comments.) You can do the same thing with Google Reader folders and Facebook “Friends Lists.”

But if you are in scanning mode, what do you do when you find something interesting to read? There are now a number of “read later” services, but my favorite is still Instapaper which gives you a nicely formatted offline reading experience on your smart phone or Kindle. Flipboard and many other apps have Instapaper support built-in. But this doesn’t work for everything. What if someone links to a book? Or a movie? Or an article which doesn’t work in Instapaper? Or perhaps it is just a website you want to save for later?

In that case, my favorite option is the social bookmarking service Pinboard.in. Pinboard can be set to archive your Twitter account and even automatically bookmark every link in your Twitter feed. But I prefer more selective control. For that there is an option to only bookmark “starred” tweets. This means that as I read Twitter I can “favorite” something and know it will be bookmarked in Pinboard. I can then return later and process the links accordingly. I will usually add books to my Amazon wishlist, movies to my RottenTomatoes “want to see” list, and articles to my Zotero list.

Browsing

Browsing is a more engaged and purposeful type of scanning. This is what I do when I’m doing research. There are really a couple of different activities I might be engaged in when I’m browsing. I might be actively searching online, in which case I’ll add finds to my Amazon wish list or Zotero, or perhaps save a website to Evernote (Pinboard can also archive websites offline, but I prefer Evernote because I can also save PDFs, and I can select which part of a webpage I wish to archive – it also works well on iOS.) I also get various TOC and Google Scholar Search alerts via email. But here I want to focus on another type of browsing which is the process of going through actual texts and figuring out what you want to do with them.

I used to use Sente for this, but increasingly I find it easier to simply save PDFs in a folder in my Dropbox account which seamlessly syncs with my favorite PDF reading application: GoodReader. It is much easier to sit on the couch with my iPad and quickly scan these PDFs than it is to do at my desktop. The articles I must read go in a “must read” folder. For books, I download sample book chapters to Kindle, and use the Kindle iPad app in the same way. The books I decide to read I then buy from Amazon. If the book isn’t available on Amazon (or anywhere else), I will scan the book in Google Books if I can, or sometimes the publisher has a sample chapter.

Increasingly many books are available online in PDF even if the publisher doesn’t officially make them available as texts. This happened with the music industry earlier, and I think academic publishers would do well to learn from the past by making their books available via legitimate services like Amazon and Apple. One interesting new option is 1dollarscan which will scan your books at a rate of $1 for 100 pages. The downside is that (for copyright reasons) they will then pulp the book after scanning it for you. For a cheap PDF of a book not currently available, one could purchase a cheap used copy online and send it to 1dollarscan. I haven’t tried this, but you might even be able to have the book sent to them directly.

Devouring

So you’ve finally got your articles in Instapaper, Kindle, and/or GoodReader and want to sit down with a cup of tea and engage in some more careful reading. Things still aren’t that simple. What if you want to take notes? While printed texts can all be dealt with in the same way: a highlighter and/or a pencil, electronic texts have different restrictions depending on the software and publisher. Instapaper lets you save articles you like directly to Evernote. GoodReader lets you highlight text and then email a summary of your highlights, which you can send to Evernote via your private Evernote email address. A more complicated scenario is when you have a PDF that doesn’t have text which can be selected. Then you either need to run it through OCR software on your computer, or use GoodReader’s other annotation tools which let you draw over the PDF. (I usually use the “box” tool and simply draw a box around the text I am interested in.) The annotated PDF can then be sent to Evernote, which will do it’s own OCR, allowing you to search the full-text of the PDF (assuming you have a “pro” account).

Kindle is more difficult. Kindle lets you make highlights (read this tutorial), but then you need to go to the webpage and copy those annotations back to your computer. There is no way to simply copy or email these annotations from the Kindle app. Because some publishers restrict how many annotations you are allowed to make on a single book, you might need to backup and delete some of your annotations before you can make additional highlights. For the tech savvy, there are also ways to crack the Kindle DRM and save the book you’ve bought as a PDF in GoodReader, where you will be free of such restrictions.

As I mentioned above, it is very easy to find oneself spending far too much time “scanning” and “browsing” and not nearly enough time actually “devouring” the books and articles that we have already decided to read. It is too easy to be distracted by the constant stream of incoming distractions. Research shows we are far worse at getting back to concentrating on the task at hand than we think we are. My solution for this has been to adopt the Pomodoro approach. This means you set a timer for 20 to 25 minutes during which you don’t do anything except read. When I started doing this I found myself itching to check Twitter after about ten minutes. Slowly, using this approach, I’ve re-trained myself to go for longer without seeking distractions. You then “reward” yourself with 5-10 min of scanning before doing another “Pomodoro.” I personally found Pomodoropro to be the best Pomodoro app for iOS. They don’t yet have an iPad version, but the iPhone version works just fine on the iPad.

That’s it for now. A year ago I wrote a similar post about “going paperless” but a lot has changed in a year. I imagine next year this will all look hopelessly out of date. If you have your own suggestions, or a more Android friendly version of some of the iOS apps I listed above, feel free to share them in the comments.

1. Photographs as notes/mnemonic devices. I use cameras all the time during fieldwork as a way to record all sorts of details—from the covers of newspapers to bus schedules and new graffiti. I often do this in conjunction with taking quick notes or “jottings” in a small notebook. Sometimes it works to write a few lines, and sometimes it’s a lot easier—and maybe more effective—to use a camera phone or small point and shoot to record something that I might otherwise forget. These kinds of photographs are really useful when I sit down at the end of the day and write up more detailed fieldnotes, and I find that they jog my memory pretty well. This way of using photography is a bit different, since I am often less concerned about making a technically “good” photograph (framing, exposure, etc) and more concerned with getting something recorded so I don’t forget about it. Of course, it’s always a good idea to get the best image possible, but the most important thing is getting that detail, bit of information, or idea secured so you can write about it later. I have a feeling that plenty of other ethnographers do something along these lines and I’d be interested to hear if and how they do so.

2. Photographs as social objects. I am really fascinated by this approach, and I have borrowed a lot from folks like Elizabeth Edwards and Arjun Appaduri with this particular method. Sure, it’s important to think about photographs based upon image content, but it’s also really fascinating to look at how photographs are social objects that pass through different networks of meaning. I explored this aspect of photography during my MA fieldwork in Oaxaca, when I asked research participants about their photographic collections and then used particular images as research prompts during interviews. This was amazingly interesting, since many of these personal collections illustrated all kinds of histories that do not exactly show up in more formal histories (by politicians, historians, anthropologists, etc). For this method I also brought down a few of the ethnographies that had been written about this pueblo, and used the photographs in those texts as starting prompts as well—that worked pretty well to get conversations going, and to talk about how the pueblo had changed since the 1950s and 1970s.

3. Portaits. This was another way I used photography during my MA research, and at some point I need to revisit these images and put them into some sort of final form (book, website?). Basically, at the end of each interview I asked people if they would allow me to take photographs of them, and many of them agreed. I tend to avoid directing people very much, and tried to give them photographs that they like. This is the really great part about digital photography: I could show people the images I’d taken immediately to see what they think. I would then run into town and get some prints made and hand those out during subsequent interviews and visits. It pays, of course, to follow up on these sorts of things—this is one way in which photography can be a sort of rapport-building tool. This is one way in which my photographs become social objects that start getting passed around (whether in print or digital form). They definitely have a lot of value for research participants, and I think they also have plenty of ethnographic value as well. I certainly do not think that these sorts of images should be seen simply as illustrations of ethnographic texts, but that’s just me. These kinds of images are best, in my view, when combined with captions that detail the moment the image was taken and other contextual information. Sure, there are times when photographs can stand alone, but I tend to prefer some direction/focus.

4. Place/space. I often use photography to document key places during the research process. This could be a plaza, a house, a road a landscape, etc. These kinds of images tend to be somewhat mid-range shots to distant shots. I started off in the landscape photography tradition, so I end up taking a lot of these kinds of photos. Much like the note-taking photography listed in #1 above, this type of photography can have many different uses. For my dissertation work I am working on a way to use photography as a tool to document how people think about and use particular places. Borrowing some ideas from geographers and anthropologists who employ “mobile methods,” the plan is to use photography to record key landmarks and places while walking with people through landscapes/places. These photographs will then be used during later interviews. I have a good amount of experience doing archaeological surveys, and I used a similar method to document sites and cultural landscapes. Walking through a particular site, especially with someone who has a close connection to a place, is very different from sitting in a room talking about that place. I am still working on how I am going to employ this method—and how I am going to write about it in grant proposals. But I think this particular use has a lot of potential, especially since the creation of meaning and place is a key question for my research.

This is just a rough sketch of some of the ways that I use photography, and I am more interested in a discussion about using this tool (and writing about it) than rehashing my own ideas. So if you use photography, and have written about how and why you use it, I hope you’ll post a response in the comments section. I definitely think that it’s about time for anthropologists to look into some different methods, and to rethink the standard methodological canon that we rely on. Yes, participant observation and written fieldnotes are foundational, but there is definitely room for exploring some other methods as well, especially since they can be useful in a very synergistic way. Anyway, I’m interested to hear what some of you think about this.

Eli Pariser tells us, not too surprisingly, that Google adapts to our needs, showing us stuff it thinks we are more likely to be interested in.

If you’re a foodie, says Jake Hubert, a Google spokesman, “over time, you’ll see more results for apple the fruit not for Apple the computer, and that’s based on your Web history.”

Which is fine, except that

in a effort to single out users for tailored recommendations or advertisements, personalization tends to sort people into categories that may limit their options. It is a system that cocoons users, diminishing the kind of exposure to opposing viewpoints necessary for a healthy democracy, says Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and the author of “You Are Not a Gadget.”

“People tend to get into this echo chamber where more and more of what they see conforms to the idea of who some software thinks they are — like a Nascar dad who likes samurai swords,” Mr. Lanier says. “You start to become more and more like the image of you because that is what you are seeing.”

Perhaps more troubling, from Lehrer’s piece, is a recent study by U of Chicago sociologist James Evans

in which he analyzed 34 million academic articles published in the last 50 years. Though the digitization of journals has made it far easier to find this information—most articles are now accessible online—Mr. Evans found that digitization also coincided with a narrowing of citations. Since search engines rank highly cited articles first, scholars tend to focus on them, which leads to the neglect of more obscure research, even when it is relevant.

These concerns are nothing new. People have been writing about homophily for some time. But the rise of social networking, and its integration into how we read the newspaper or search the web, has made more people aware of the issue.

I know I am not a typical user of these technologies, but not having researched the issue in depth I can only draw from my own experience. What I’ve found is that while my online world is more insulated than ever before from your typical FOX News viewer, I encounter a much broader range of similar-but-different views online than I ever did before. Through blogging, Twitter, and Facebook, I’m much more likely to be exposed to people who share similar fears and concerns, but have a different way of looking at those issues. And since there is a broad similarity, I am much less likely to dismiss those views and much more likely to actively engage with those people than I would if I was forced to read the New York Post every day. In a sense then, homophily actually expands the range of views and opinions I interact with seriously rather than contracting them.

At the same time, however, I find good reasons to worry about the effects of these technologies on academic research. For one thing, Google and Facebook’s algorithms are trade secrets. That means that we don’t really know why we are being shown one search result rather than another. Another concern is that it is all too easy to see homophily as a problem which affects other people, not ourselves. But how can we know for sure? It is easy enough to be swept along by inertia, forgetting that we might need to make a special effort to get out of our narrow comfort range (or what Google/Facebook thinks our comfort range might be) when conducting research.

But more than anything else, I think we are still ignorant to the extent to which our online experience is being shaped by these algorithms. I was surprised to learn, from this interview with Pariser, just how much Facebook social engineers each user’s online interactions:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Now, how in general does Facebook work to keep us on Facebook?

ELI PARISER: For example, they know that if you’re a 30-something woman and you see that your female friends have uploaded pictures of themselves, you’re likely to upload a picture of yourself in the next month. And they know that if you do that, that your male friends are very likely to comment on that picture, and they know that if your male friends comment on that picture, they’re likely to stay on Facebook for months to come.

And so, what Facebook does, according to one person I talked to there, is they actually kind of run that in reverse. They say, oh, this guy looks like he’s kind of getting bored of Facebook. Let’s find one of his friends, show her pictures of her friends that they’ve uploaded so that she uploads a photo so that he comments on it so that he stays on Facebook more.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Diabolical!

Of course, most of us are more likely to use Google Scholar than Facebook when doing academic research, but that is changing, and sites like Mendeley.com and Academia.edu seem eager to turn academic research into more of a Facebook-like experience. We should at least be aware of the issues this might raise if they succeed and begin thinking about how we could make the best use of such tools without falling into some of the traps mentioned above.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Margaret Mead once said that anthropology is a “discipline of words” (Mead 2003), and I think in many ways this is still true today.  Sure, American Anthropologist now has a section devoted to visual anthropology, and there are other great journals like Visual Anthropology Review that focus specifically on the use of still photography and other visual methods.  However, when it comes to the main canon of ethnographic methods, discussions of photography are conspicuously absent.  The methods courses that I have taken, and the standard methodological textbooks and articles that I have been exposed to, generally do not mention much about photography or other visual methods*.  They talk about writing proposals, designing research plans, sampling strategies, interview methods, participant observation, and so on.  Rarely are cameras mentioned, yet, ironically, photographs continue to crop up in ethnography after ethnography.  Clearly, most anthropologists bring cameras of some sort to the field, but for some reason they don’t talk much about them.

So what’s with the silence?  In some cases, it might be because some anthropologists and ethnographers see photographs and other visual materials as less objective or scientific than, say, fieldnotes.  And this is a pretty old debate in anthropology, one that has gone through a series of concatenations.  These debates about truth and representation are pretty fascinating since when photography was invented it was–at least in some circles–seen as the ultimate technological arbiter or truth.  This battle between words and images continues today.  From my experience in anthropology, it seems pretty clear that words reign supreme for the most part, despite the long history of engagement that the discipline has with visual methods.  This is a curious and fascinating situation–especially for someone who is in the thick of writing grant proposals, which require plenty of tactical choices when it comes to methods.  Are words more reliable than images?  Are they less subjective?

Granted, the photographic process is highly selective.  In fact, that’s what photography is all about: making good, effective images is very much a matter of deciding what should be including in the frame and what should be left out.  Photography is, after all, grabbing fragments from oceans of chaotic information.  Probably one of the biggest mistakes that beginning photographers make is that they put far too much in the frame.  Lens choice, angle, lighting, timing, shutter speed, and f-stop selection are all part of this calculus of composition and exclusion.  Clearly, there are a lot of editorial choices that go into making photographs.  During the observation of a particular situation or event, a photographer is always selecting small bits and pieces of reality to focus on and capture.  Life moves, so you grab what you can with the camera as it passes by.  That’s just how things work–there is no way to completely capture an entire situation, ever.  Perspective, choice, timing, and the limits of photographic equipment always guarantee one thing: it’s only possible to capture fragmented, partial realities.  That shouldn’t be a shocking realization.  So is photography simply too subjective for use in anthropology?  Are words–and fieldnotes–more reliable, accurate, and stable?

Imagine you’re doing participant observation and you’re taking fieldnotes.  You’re in a public plaza filled with 50 people, and you have your notebook and pencil at the ready.  Your goal is to capture the situation.  There is a flurry of activity all around you, and you frantically jot down as many details as you can.  Participants are engaged in numerous conversations, but you can only hear bits and pieces of those that are close by.  Your perspective, which is anything but omniscient, is partial–you can’t see exactly what everyone is doing.  Later, you will take these rapid notes and expand them in more fully developed fieldnotes.  This is pretty standard practice for taking fieldnotes.  This is what “doing ethnography” is all about.  This is the ground floor of ethnographic data collection that results, eventually, in finished ethnographic texts.  I think it’s pretty safe to say that fieldnotes–and writing in general–take precedence in the production of ethnographic authority.  This is the methodological foundation of ethnography.

Yet, there literally endless editorial choices that go into taking fieldnotes, much like there are choices that go into taking pictures.  The decision to focus on one particular event or interaction is also very much about excluding other possibilities.  There are always choices involved in any observational process, whether it be note-taking, photographing, recording audio, or filming.  There is no way to capture the entirety of any human interaction, even if you have a multi-million dollar light, sound, and film crew at your disposal.  Not gonna happen.  Ok, you might be asking, so what does this all mean?

My point here is not to go down the rabbit hole of “truth” and attempt to argue that either photographs or words are somehow more truthful, accurate, or reliable.  That’s not where I am going, at all.  Each method has its positives, of course.  What I am saying is this: if ethnographers use cameras all the time (whether they are using iPhones or $5000 SLRs), it might be a good idea to rethink how and why they use them.  Simply avoiding the discussion doesn’t really cut it.  Now, rethinking the use of photography doesn’t mean that every ethnographer needs to become a master photographer overnight, and it doesn’t mean that using photography needs to be turned into some overcomplicated methodological nightmare.  It simply means paying attention to how and why photography is used as part of the larger ethnographic process, from preliminary note-taking to the production of finished articles and books.

From my perspective, it just makes sense to open up the discussion about the ways in which we use photography in anthropological fieldwork, rather than making uncritical assumptions and just putting pictures in books and articles.  Photography is another tool, and it might be beneficial to treat is as such.  This isn’t a discussion that only applies to visual anthropologists, since pretty much every anthropologist uses photography in some form or another.  The use of any medium for data collection, analysis, and presentation–whether paper and pencil, laptop, or camera–has its limitations and possibilities.

Photography, in the end, isn’t any more or less subjective than taking fieldnotes.  It has its own benefits and drawbacks, and to me it makes sense to add discussions about using cameras–as a primary component of anthropological research–to our general methodological conversations.  It would be even better to incorporate the use of different forms of media into our overall disciplinary training and teaching.   I know this is happening in certain cases, but I think there is considerable room for rethinking not only how we put photography to use, but other forms of media as well.  Anthropologists are producers of media, after all, and while we spend a lot of time exploring how and why we use words, for some reason we often overlook all of the images and photographs we happen to make along the way.

In an attempt to continue this conversation, my next post here will be about anonymity in ethnographic photography.  Should we keep identities hidden and anonymous at all costs?  Are there times when it’s best to show faces and reveal identities?  Who should make these decisions?  This is definitely a subject that covers some pretty tricky ethical territory, so I will be interested to see what some of you have to say.  Until then.

*Yes, there are several books that talk about visual methods.  For example, check out the work of Sara Pink, Paul Hockings, Fadwa El Guindi, and Gillian Rose, among others.

References

Mead, Margaret.  2003[1974].  Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words.  In Principles of Visual Anthropology, 3rd Edition.  Paul Hockings, ed.  Pp. 3-10.  New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

You’ve got several options, 1) write a book review, tearing apart the author for poor research, 2) kindly fold in a gentle critique into your future writing, or 3) contact the author with the goal of establishing a collaboration. Scholars deal with appearances of theoretical mistakes, oversights and overstatements, or malum prohibitum, all the time. It is our engagement with what we perceive as disciplinarily not accurate in generative and creative ways that builds theory and nudges the future of the discipline. This is theory building and this is what we do.

But what is our professional responsibility to malum in se, claims that are factually wrong? I am talking about the very quotidian error when a writer notes the wrong dates for events and misnames a person. I am also talking about the questionable representation of reality in those necessarily interpretive instances, like when a practice first began, or by whom, or what was the dominant influence behind the emergence of that practice. For example, synchronic work from a diachronic perspective is always somewhat limited. Such historiographical debates are generative. My point is that errors run a spectrum from the incontrovertible to malum prohibitum—from my perspective it is not as right as it could be. Again, these debates are what we do.

As anthropologists, we are going to always be able to critique most other even softer sciences for their methodological inadequacies. As I come in contact with more work in cultural, textual, media, and other hermeneutical studies I entrench more into empiricism and pragmatism. The anthropology of emergence, I think, is at its best when it is focused first on description. These other disciplines often skip that part and jump right into theory; making factual errors in the process. For those of us doing the rigorous movement through our data and the lives of our subjects identifying malum in se in this work is easy. But what to do?

I agree with one of my mentors, Tom Boellstorff, who is adamant that budding anthropologists studying related areas be collegial. He chides us to not get into the seductive trap of trying to make a career out of denouncing our colleagues. I’ve taken a look at the anthropologists researching one of my major foci, the internet, and I can count them with one hand. With and not against these colleagues I will attempt to first accurately describe and secondly carefully theorize this emergent culture. Thus I am going with option 3 and contacting the dead wrong scholar and future collaborator.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INPUT: If you aren’t starting with a digital document from JSTOR, you need to scan your paper. My school has a fancy photocopy machine which can chew up an article and spit out a nice small PDF file, but if you don’t have access to that you can get yourself a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 (or S1500M for the Mac) which can do the same thing. If you have a smartphone with a good camera you can also simply take a snapshot and use software like JotNot to convert those photos to something resembling a scanned document.

STORAGE: Once you’ve scanned something or downloaded it from the web, what do you do with it? Personally I am a big fan of Evernote which will do OCR on your (English) image and PDF files and which lets you do fulltext search on your entire library. It also can sync between your computer and mobile apps. But for academic texts I need structured metadata. I need to be able to pull out citations and insert them in my bibliography, etc. For that I use Sente. The iPad version of Sente pro finally came out and it is amazing. (See my review of the free version.) Unfortunately, Sente and Evernote still aren’t enough. I have some huge PDF files which aren’t handled well by either app so I also depend on Dropbox to sync those files across computers. And while all of these options have the ability to share with others, I find the easiest way to share files online is with Google Docs so I also use that, especially for teaching.

READING/ANNOTATING: Sente is pretty good for annotation, and I’m sure it will get better, but my favorite way to read PDFs right now is with iAnnotate for the iPad. I find the reading experience nicer than Sente which currently only shows one page at a time. For academic reading it is nice to be able to quickly scan whole paragraphs which cross page boundaries. And for documents where text is not “selectable” (such as docs I’ve scanned myself but not OCR’d) I like iAnnotate’s ability to add little “stamps” in the margins, such as a check mark, exclamation point, or question mark. When done both Sente and iAnnotate have the ability to export selected text and notes along with the marked up PDF. I email these to Evernote. (The fact that Sente syncs its annotations back to the desktop means you don’t have to do this step if you just use Sente.)

Not everything is on PDF. More and more academic texts are now available on Amazon’s Kindle and other ebook formats. (Although sometimes the pricing is ridiculously high. Academic books from UK publishers can cost over eighty dollars as an ebook!) What I like about Kindle is the ability to easily access one’s annotations online via the Amazon web interface. That and the fact that my annotations are synced between all my various devices. (I don’t have a Kindle, but I use the Kindle software on my iOS devices and my desktop.) I have not found anything as useful in other ebook software. One problem, however, is that Kindle books don’t give you proper page numbers. You can just cite it as an electronic text as the APA recommends, or you can do a full text search for the material on Google Books or Amazon book search to see the page number.

NOTE TAKING/PROOFREADING: One of the last redoubts for paper in my workflow has been those few places where pen on paper just seems to work best: taking notes during a talk or marking up text while proofreading. But recently I found something which makes it possible for me to do this on my iPad without printing out: Note Taker HD. The trick is that it lets you “write” in a special writing box. This allows you to write large letters with your finger, but have it appear small on the page. You can also switch to a standard writing mode where you can mark up the page directly. You can either write on a blank piece of paper or you can import a PDF, such as a PDF of the paper you are working on or a student’s paper you need to correct. It may not be quite as good as pen and paper, but it works well enough for me that I’ve stopped printing things out. I’ve tried several similar apps, but I find Note Taker HD to be the best. However, for taking notes at lectures or while interviewing people it is also worth mentioning SoundNote which can record audio as you type notes. Afterwards you can then lookup the relevant audio by clicking on the word you were typing when it was recorded—a little like how Livescribe works.

With these tools I’m able to avoid using paper nearly eighty percent of the time. The waste generated creating all these electronic devices may not be any better for the environment than cutting down trees, but keeping everything electronic means it is all searchable and I’m less likely to loose it. And now that so much data is stored on the cloud, it also means I can access my library and my notes from just about anywhere that has web access. As someone who travels between at least three countries every year, I like the idea of having most of my stuff stored in the cloud. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to join the Cult of Less but it is an idea that appeals to me. More importantly, in 2010 it is finally within the realm of the possible.

Rex recently asked for “anthropology creeds” but for the life of me I can’t write one. So instead I’ll write about why I think the task is impossible. An anti-creed if you like.

In short, I think that anthropology, like Christmas, or the island on Lost, is whatever you want it to be. Every discipline in academia also exists as a mirror-self within anthropology: economics, semiotics, medicine, political-science, genetics, religion, history…etc., all have their counterparts in anthropology. And not just one counterpart either. Just looking at economic anthropology, one can take a myriad of different approaches to the subject all of which are called anthropology. Just about the only approach not called anthropology would be that used by economists… and even there I’m sure you can find some anthropologists whose work isn’t too different from what you would find in an economics journal.

Some scholars have tried to do an end-run around the question by defining anthropology in terms of its method rather than its subject matter. This is what the AAA tries to do in defining sociocultural anthropology.  But that runs into two problems: First of all, anthropologists don’t own “ethnography.” Lots of other disciplines now use ethnography as a standard methodological tool. Secondly, not all anthropologists do ethnography. There are historical anthropologists and those in Foucauldian governmentality studies whose research might sometimes include ethnography but is often much more concerend with textual analysis. Then there are archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and linguists who also frequently do work which is not ethnographic (although, again, many do include ethnography). I would even add that a lot of traditional, supposedly ethnographic, cultural anthropology often uses ethnography in a very superficial way. All too often, journal articles invoke ethnography to confer legitimacy on a text which isn’t really ethnographic at all. I don’t say this as a criticism, I personally think anthropologists should be wary of fetishizing methodology. Ethnography is a big part of who we are, but I don’t think we should be defined by it.

Instead of trying to define the discipline as a whole, we are better off thinking of ourselves as social scientists, writ large. To the extent that we function within anthropology departments, publish in anthropology journals, and hang out with 6,000 anthropologists at the annual meetings, we are anthropologists. But within that there are multiple “anthropologies” which function more-or-less independently of the whole. We can (and often do) choose to wear multiple hats, defined by our training (“Temple Anthropologist”), specialty (“Linguistic Anthropologist”), politics (“Marxist Anthropologist”) etc. Sometimes all three (or more!) at the same time – including all the contradictions which come with that.

The real problem, I think, is the way institutions are increasingly forcing us to narrowly define our area of expertise. This is particularly bad in Taiwan where academic evaluations can be down-graded for lacking focus, even when the scholar in question has only two or three areas of interest. I recently read a talk by James Clifford which addressed this issue. He called for “creating a multiplex, adaptive, hyphenating/connecting knowledge space that is…fundamentally interpretive, realist, historical, and ethico-political.” I think this is what anthropology needs to be as well. We shouldn’t settle for anything less.

Addendum: If one were to seriously try to define anthropology, I would probably adopt a prototype semantics approach, defining key features which may or may not be present in the work of any individual anthropologist. Umberto Eco famously did this in his definition of Fascism [PDF]. Perhaps another time…

UPDATE: Proper link to James Clifford’s talk.

One of the most vigilant members of the SM community, John McCreery (PhD Cornell, 1973), just returned from EPIC, Ethnographic Praxis in Corporations, a conference which took place August 29th-September 1, 2010 in downtown Tokyo with this guest blogger report. It was a local event for John who has lived in Japan since 1980. John is a pioneer in the creative application of anthropological training in corporate contexts having first worked as a copywriter and creative director for Hakuhodo Inc. (1983-1996) and later becoming a Partner and Vice-President of The Word Works, Ltd. (www.wordworks.jp). Kochira koso, John, for this excellent look at EPIC. –AF

An EPIC Experience by John McCreery

All is not well in the world of EPIC, Ethnographic Praxis in Corporations. That said, there is much to envy and admire. Having struggled over the last fifteen years to establish ethnography as an essential component in the corporate research toolkit, participants in EPIC 2010, held this week in Tokyo, confront an environment in which economic recession has slashed budgets and shortened projects, while acceptance has led to routinization, erosion of perceived value, and the threat of deskilling. Above all, corporate ethnography, like the survey and focus group, is threatened by the rise of analytics that draw on the Internet for near real-time access to changes in user behavior. There is, however, a notable lack of panic and despair in the EPIC community. These are, after all, people who have faced tough times before and created new roles for themselves.

I may have become aware of EPIC in 2005, when the first conference was held on the campus of Microsoft in Redmond, WA. My first close encounter was the EPIC 2010 pre-conference held at the University of Tokyo the Saturday before EPIC 2010 itself took place at Tokyo Midtown. The pre-conference was an opportunity for 180 students and other interested parties without the time or money for EPIC 2010 itself to hear major players in the EPIC community talk about ethnography in the corporate context. The affiliations of the speakers revealed a strong bias toward high-tech companies and the external and internal suppliers of user-experience research. Their talks demonstrated that that ethnographic research in corporations has come a long way from ethnography’s original aim of detailed, holistic accounts of particular peoples’ ways of life based on long-term cultural immersion. In the corporate world, short-term and multi-sited are now the norm. And editing persuasive video is now a critical part of what is no longer purely “writing” up. Visual framing and story telling are a critical part of the deliverables that corporations demand.

Ken Anderson, a senior researcher at Intel, described a project that began with the ethnographic discovery that most PC users use their computers intermittently, around three and a half minutes a time. This result was of interest to chip designers, who had envisioned computers operating for hours or days at a stretch. Further research, using unobtrusive software to monitor usage in a sample of PC users, confirmed this observation and generated data for a vivid visualization presented to Intel executives. The result was development of a new generation of Turbo chips, specially designed for quick start-up and shut-down, with minimum power consumption.

Victoria Belotti and James Glasnapp from PARC talked about the challenges of managing teams in which ethnographers collaborate with social scientists, a.k.a., practitioners of quantitative analysis, designers and engineers. Collaboration was a topic that recurred throughout EPIC 2010 itself.

Luis Arnal from in/situm noted the similarities between ethnographers and designers. Both are rebellious, provocateurs, outsiders trying to create something new. Both are constantly combining ideas, good observers, empathetic, risk takers, highly visual, simplify the complex, systems thinkers, passionate, divergent, comfortable with ambiguity, detail oriented, adapt ideas to new uses, and know that theory does not make you good. Doing it does. Practice is key.

Hiroshi Tamura from Hakhodo suggested the importance of backcasting and extreme interviews. In contrast to the forecaster who projects forward from current observations, the backcaster starts from an imagined future and searches for its seeds in the present. In contrast to conventional interviews, whose aim is to understand the norm, extreme interviews target outliers in search of the unconventional. Both techniques are vital for those who see themselves, not as market researchers but as inspiration researchers.

It was Simon Pullman-Jones, Global Director Ethnography/Innovation for GfK, who sounded a warning bell. He observed how historically market research was a risk-management function but now is under pressure to drive innovation. Market researchers have embraced ethnography’s buzz words, so that now everyone is talking about closeness, immersion, bringing to life, natural, over time, observation, word of mouth, community, semiotics, emergence. These are words that sell but are no longer, if they ever were, ethnography’s exclusive property.

EPIC 2010 itself enjoyed the sorts of amenities that corporate sponsorship provides. The Tokyo Midtown venue was in Roppongi, now one of Tokyo’s most fashionable addresses, and part of the Roppongi Art Triangle that includes the new Art Center of Tokyo, the Suntory Museum, which is part of Tokyo Midtown itself, and the Mori Art Museum, atop Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills. Program and signage were custom-designed. A light breakfast and Japanese lunch boxes were laid on for all participants, eliminating the need to scatter in search of sustenance. A Dean & Delucca’s was handy for those who wanted something else.

The EPIC 2010 program was carefully designed and achieved a high level of intellectual consistency as well as community-building effervesence. The overall theme was dō (the Japanese concept drived from the Chinese dao), the “way” that appears in the names of such martial arts as judō and aikidō or less martial arts such as sadō (tea ceremony) or kadō (ikebana, flower arranging). The opening keynote “EMPTINESS-The Prime Image of Japanese Communication” delivered by Muji art director Kenya Hara set the tone. The paper sessions developed the topics “The Way of Industry,” “Pioneering the Path,” “Obstacles and Opportunities Along the Way,” and “The Way of the Way,” highlighting the thoughts and concerns of current ethnography in industry leaders. The second day’s minitours exposed participants to traditional, e.g., koto, and less traditional, kosplay, Japanese arts and were followed by a panel on the relationship of dō, the Way, to kata, Form. Pecha-kucha and artifacts sessions gave less senior participants a chance to showcase their work.

Since the proceedings will be available via Anthrosource, I would like to end by mentioning three papers that I found especially impressive. In “Practice at the Crossroads: When Practice Meets Theory,” Melissa Cefkin from IBM Research noted how, in the business context, “the question shifts from how we [the ethnographers] use and understand concepts of practice to how it frames the expectations of our business partners and stakeholders.” There is, she said, “both productive overlap and significant slippage between our (theoretically buttressed and anthropologically-resonant) notions of practice and the (action-oriented, practical ones) of our business counterparts.”

In “The Martial Ethnographic Arts” Suzanne Thomas from Intel suggested documentary finesse (the art of capturing the critical moment), journeying (the rite of passage that begins when a project is first conceived and does not end when the report is written), and discipline (“more yogic than Foucaultian”) as the keys to avoiding the routinization that destroys the value of ethnographic research. I found her image of the yoga pose or martial arts kata—repetitive but, to the mindful eye, unique in each instantiation—compelling.

In “The ‘Inner Game’ of Ethnography” Stokes Jones (Lodestar, Institute of Design-IIT) argues passionately that, “Deliverables such as experience models, personas, and opportunity matrices have overshadowed the actual ‘way’ of practicing ethnography.” He noted the deskilling and degradation he felt when, as part of an international, four-site team, he was handed a five-step model of a purchase-decision process and asked only to fill in the blanks. It is time, he said, for ethnographers to refocus once again on their inner game. For only in this way, he argued, can ethnographers, “end the double-game between inner and outer standards and increase the discipline’s authority such that it better fulfills its promise.”

In all three of these papers I see distilled an attitude that the EPIC community embodies. Times have changed, new threats have appeared, but this community looks backward only to look forward again.

DAVID DUNNING: Here’s a thought. The road to self-insight really runs through other people. So it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting. Is the world telling you good things? Is the world rewarding you in a way that you would expect a competent person to be rewarded? If you watch other people, you often find there are different ways to do things; there are better ways to do things. I’m not as good as I thought I was, but I have something to work on. Now, the sad part about that is — there’s been a replication of this with medical students — people at the bottom, if you show them what other people do, they don’t get it. They don’t realize that what those other people are doing is superior to what they’re doing. And that’s the troubling thing. So for people at the bottom, that social comparison information is a wonderful piece of information, but they may not be in a position to take advantage of it like other people.

ERROL MORRIS: But wait a second. You’re supposed to benefit from feedback. But the people that you’ve picked are dunderheads. And you lack the ability to discriminate between dunderheads and non-dunderheads, between good advice and bad advice, between that which makes sense and that which makes no sense. So the community does you no damn good!

DAVID DUNNING: You know, I think that is an issue. Those among us who are in the 40th percentile, they’re not the best, but they’re not doing too badly. But people at the bottom, you’re going to have to be open-minded and you’re going to have some special hurdles, internal hurdles you have to get over. If people give you conflicting advice, congratulations, you don’t know how to choose. Yes, it is a tricky part of the problem.

I think this is a central problem for teachers trying to get through to the bottom 40% of a class. Often it seems that these students simply don’t do the work. But I think it isn’t so simple. I believe they don’t see the purpose of doing the work. While they understand that there is some information in the assignments that they are missing, they don’t see this information as adding up to new skills, new ways of thinking about the world which might be of benefit to them. For instance, in a class on documentary film, I had one student who was still, after a whole semester of learning about various approaches to discussing films (structure, form, narrative style, etc.) was unable to compare two films. He kept comparing the events portrayed in the films, but didn’t understand what I wanted when I asked him to focus on the films themselves rather than the events they portrayed. In some important way I failed to convince this student that there was anything of value to learn in my class.

As anthropologists we find ourselves in the opposite situation. We are often in the bottom 40% (or worse) in terms of our understanding of the culture we are trying to study (unless you happen to be working in your own culture). And while we differ from the student in the above example in that we know there is something we don’t know and are very motivated to learn it, we still “don’t get” a lot of what our informants try to tell us. I’ve long felt that there is a certain hubris to anthropological research, in the idea that you can spend ten to eighteen months somewhere and then attempt to speak authoritatively about it. The only thing saving us are our collaborators. As Dunning says: “it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting.” But also on our ability to listen to that feedback, which I think is much harder than we would like to believe.

In 1990 [1900], the renowned mathematician David Hilbert laid down a challenge to future generations: 23 hand-picked mathematical problems, all difficult, all important, and all unsolved. Since then, countless mathematicians around the world have struggled to solve the 23 ‘Hilbert Problems’ (ten have been resolved; eleven are partly solved or simply cannot be solved; and two remain at large). Most important, the pursuit of the solutions had a profound and fundamental influence on the roadmap for 20th century mathematics, testament to Hilbert’s foresight.

So begins an announcement about a Harvard symposium aimed at identifying a similar list of problems for the social sciences. I thought it might be interesting to poll our readers about their own ideas for a list of “hard problems in anthropology.” Does it make sense to compile such a list? What would you put on the list? What would it mean for cultural anthropologists to “solve” a problem.Are there any such problems from a previous era that we’ve already solved?

Off the top of my head, I can think of two typical anthropological “problems.” Each posing different challenges to a Hilbertesque approach to defining a list of such problems.

The first might be phrased as “What’s the matter with Kansas?” That is, why do people seem to act contrary to their own class interests? But even asking the problem causes problems. Larry Bartels famously asked: What’s the Matter With ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas?’, which undermined many of the premises of Frank’s book. The difficulties of defining “class interests” in the first place makes this question so much messier than a mathematical problem.

The second is more typical of contemporary anthropology and could be stated thus: “What are the cultural logics that make X actions thinkable, practicable, and desirable?” (Paraphrased from the introduction to Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship.) Having observed some phenomenon, anthropologists then collect the stories people tell about that problem and interpret them in light of our own understanding of how institutional and cultural practices shape such stories. Here the problem isn’t so much the question, but identifying under what conditions we might consider the problem “solved”? One can’t jump in the same river twice and so each anthropologist who asks such a question will very likely come up with different answers.

So what do our readers think? Does it make sense to compile such a list? If so, what would you put on it? And how would you define a problem as being “solved”? If not, might there be a better way to focus the efforts of cultural anthropology on a set of common problems?

(Hat tip to Ennis for the link.)