And so it also went in Palestine in 2009. The one’s who returned my rampant calls, emails, and door knocks were not the Israeli rabbis and politicians but the impoverished Palestinians. These shoots in Palestine and Northern Ireland are part of a documentary about divided cities around the world: Belfast, Jerusalem, Nicosia, Mostar, Berlin….LA. Usually the indigenous or minority population is more apt to take the gamble and work with uncredentialed mediamakers like me than the established powers who have mainstream print and TV media. These include the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the Irish in Northern Ireland, and Latinos in LA. User generated content (UGC) nonfiction media is a weapon of the weak; economics, sanctions, barriers, primetime TV, state racism are the weapons of the strong.

On St. Patty’s Day, school yourself on the indigenous Irish sovereignty movement and the Protestant colonial activities by scoping my short doc.

Current’s blurb goes: “Ten years after the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland maintains a relative calm. Despite a few isolated incidents, the fighting seems to have ended. But has this brought Protestant and Catholic groups closer together? In Belfast the two groups live in neighborhoods that are still physically separated by ‘peace walls.’”

Check it: Belfast is Still a Divided City: 90014381_belfast-is-still-a-city-divided.htm or http://current.com/items/90014381_belfast-is-still-a-city-divided.htm

A disagreement with similar contours is afoot today. The latest skirmish in the Jared Diamond wars deals not only with issues of scholarly accuracy, but also the cultural/personal motivation of the protagonists as well as the social effects of their arguments. The main protagonists are the authors of Questioning Collapse, an edited volume in which expert scholars take issue with Jared Diamond’s reading of their specialty topics: the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) specialist discusses Diamond’s use of the Rapa Nui data, the Incan specialist discusses Diamond on Pizzaro and Atahualpa, and so forth. The book is critical of Diamond, who has responded with a review in Nature that is none too friendly itself.

The Usual Denunciations are already issuing from Stinky Journalism.org, which mostly focus on how unethical it was for Diamond to write a review of a book that criticized his book without explicitly telling readers the book he was criticizing criticized him. You can check it out if you want, but I think its much more interesting to see how the back and forth between Questioning Collapse and Diamond exemplified some of the issues that played out twenty years earlier in the Sahlins/Harris debate. How do we tack between the social effects of our work and its accuracy? How can we address the cultural underpinnings that motivate an author’s writing without falling back into ad hominem attacks? How well does Collapse stand up to scholarly scrutiny? And how good a job does Questioning Collapse do of reaching out to Diamond’s popular audience? These questions are worth asking — even if you are a little burned out on the Jared Diamond wars.

In this piece I want to review Questioning Collapse through the lens of these issues. I’ll start by working backwards from Diamond’s review in Nature to the book itself. In the end, I find Questioning Collapse’s critique of Diamond extremely compelling, particularly for the way it highlights the theoretical difficulties of Diamond’s position. That said, however, Questioning Collapse’s (henceforth ‘QC’) authors often don’t do the readers any favors — as a piece of public anthropology I feel it has a long way to go.

Diamond’s piece is actually a review of two books, Questioning Collapse and The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age. In the event, however, only about 400 of its 1300 words focus on the later volume. In the review, Diamond pulls a classic Sahlins maneuver, arguing that the authors are driven by a tendentious preference for a “positive message about human behavior” is “laudable” but, unfortunately, does not mesh well with the facts. The result is a “naively optimistic redefinition” of the data which “inevitably forces one to distort history and to avoid trying to explain what really happened.” Indeed, Diamond even claims that although they take issue with his work the authors of QC “do not offer a substitute thesis” for facts which “cry out for explanation, even if one relabels them as something other than collapse”. Political correctness, it seems, blinds Questioning Collapse to The Facts. Or, as the subtitle of the review puts it, ‘realism’ (i.e. Diamond) must trump ‘positivity’ (i.e. QC).

In fact there are four themes in Questioning Collapse: that of resilience (as opposed to collage), of colonialism (‘empire expansion’), of the similarity of current environmental issues to the past, and that of what constitutes an adequate popular anthropology. Diamond deals mostly with the first two topics in his review, and I will skip the third here but I’ll address the rest as well as make a few points about the factual errors each side accuses the other of having.

Resilience versus collapse, or, seven million Mayans can’t be wrong

Is Diamond correct when he says QC’s feel-good agenda prevents it from seeing the truth about collapse? On this first major claim, I think Diamond and QC are talking past one another. At the broadest level, QC takes issue with the three key words in Collapse’s title: ‘collapse’, ’success’, and ‘choose’. What, specifically, counts as collapse? The authors of QC argue that there is more to societal continuity than Diamond’s focus on population size and social complexity. There are, they point out, millions of Mayan people alive today — how then can we say that Mayan culture has disappeared? They also point out that it is hard to tell where one society starts and another begins. Is agriculture in the Netherlands an example of ecological success once we think about the effects their importation of fodder has on countries like Brazil from which they import it? And ‘success’: how long does a society have to be around before it is officially considered to be one? In his excellent article in the QC McNeill points out that Diamond plays fast and loose with dates — the Greenland Norse, for instance, survived longer than all of the modern societies that Diamond lists as successes. And ‘choice’: many of the authors of the volume point out that societies are not people — different parts of them make different decisions for different reasons. Often times ‘choices’ are the emergent property of many individual decisions. And in a world where actions have unintended consequences, even selfish choices might end up being sustainable ones, and vice versa. It is for this reason that the authors tend to focus on ‘resilience’ rather than ‘collapse’ — on the way that populations change over time, but tend overall to endure.

In sum, QC argues that Diamond’s notion of collapse is too simple. Societies are not externally bounded and internally homogeneous. They do not make decisions like humans do. They change through time, making it difficult to identify when they change beyond recognition. Long-term trends are, they argue, mostly for continuity, which is why they use the term ‘resilience’ rather than collapse. Mayans are still around. Easter Islanders are still around — in fact, QC has little boxed-in sections highlighting contemporary descendants of supposedly-collapsed societies.

Diamond is not having any of it. He responds that “It makes no sense to me to redefine as heart-warmingly resilient a society in which everyone ends up dead, or in which most of the population vanishes, or that loses writing, state government and great art for centuries… Even when many people do survive and eventually reestablish a populous complex society, the initial decline is sufficiently important to warrant being honestly called a collapse and studied further.” Diamond’s model of collapse is that familiar to us from the video game Civilization by Sid Meier: civilizations all grow in one direction towards more and more complexity with bigger and bigger cities, and if they go down in size, you lose. The authors of QC have a more anthropological understanding of societies, insisting that they not internally homogeneous or externally bounded, that they persist in time, and that we must understand their ups and downs.

At heart, then, the resilience/collapse debate is a discussion of interpretation, not facts. Many readers will probably find Diamond’s civilization-or-bust definition of collapse compelling, and agree with him that ‘positivity’ leads QC’s authors to a tendentious interpretation of the facts. This is a pity since I think QC takes a principled and satisfying theoretical position on collapse. Still, one can see why popular readers might not be swayed.

It’s the Colonialism, Stupid

Diamond does remarkably less well when it comes to ‘empire expansion’. One of the most egregious howlers from Diamond’s review is his claim that “although the authors of Questioning Collapse may wish it were otherwise, students and laypersons alike know that Europeans did conquer the world” and that “the authors seem uncomfortable with the glaring fact that it is Europeans, not Native Australians or Americans or Africans, who have expanded over the globe in the past 500 years.” The kindest thing one can say about Diamond’s position here is that it is unintelligible, because the alternative options are that a) Diamond’s personal animus against the authors was so intense he could not understand the content of the book or b) he simply did not read the book he is reviewing.

As far as I can tell, Diamond believes the book argues the exact opposite of what it actually says. He appears to think that the authors of QC are arguing that the hand of European rule lay lightly on the colonized world, which never suffered population loss. QC doesn’t admit that there is such a thing as ‘empire expansion’? How about the ending of Michael Wilcox’s essay in the volume (one of my favorites):

Diamond’s tidy explanation of conquest and global poverty is not only factually incorrect; it gives us the sense that its origins lie somewhere out there, beyond the agency of the reader. The implication is that if conquests were situated long ago, somewhere else, then we are powerless over their contemporary manifestations. Conquests are never instantaneous, transformative, or all encompassing. They are enacted, reenacted, and rewritten for each succeeding generation. In this sense Diamond’s narrative of disappearance and marginalization is one of conquest’s most potent instruments. (p 138)

Does this sound like someone who didn’t get the memo that “Europeans did conquer the world”?

Diamond accuses QC of down-playing the role of colonialism in human history, and not offering an alternate explanation for the collapse of indigenous society, when in fact colonialism is their alternate explanation for the collapse of nonwestern societies. Wilcox writes “a more appropriate troika of destruction [than guns, germs, and steel] would be ‘lawyers, god, and money’”. Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo write that “ancient deforestation was not the cause of population collapse. If we are to apply a modern term to the tragedy of Rapa Nui, it is not ecocide but genocide.”

In sum, QC attempts to take the moral high-ground out from underneath Diamond when it comes to colonialism, arguing that he underplays the horrors of colonialism because his cultural blinkers prevent him from seeing the truth. Indeed, one of the major arguments of the book is that Diamond (and other social scientists) aid and abet on-going oppression of indigenous people. The proper response from Diamond — had he noticed — would have been to cast the authors of QC as a bunch of lefty radicals who have given up on Scientific Accuracy in the name of advocacy. Except of course he didn’t notice.

Some readers may find Wilcox’s invective overheated, and find the anti-colonial agenda of QC too ‘pc’ in their denunciation of the book’s social effects. That is why it is so gratifying that the volume also takes up the issue of accuracy and never lets go: Diamond is not just tendentious, he is also wrong. The fact that Diamond simply missed this major part of their argument really detracts from his credibility.

Fact Checking

Beyond these overarching themes there are a number of particular factual disputes between Diamond and the authors of QC. In his review, Diamond argues that the Yali he met and the Yali that Gewertz and Errington’s volume is about are different people; he argues against Wilcox that Chaco canyon was deforested; he argued against Berglund that the Greenland Norse died out, rather than emigrating; he argues against Taylor that ecology was a factor in the Rwandan genocide; and he argues against what he calls David Cahill’s “absurd rewriting” of the Spanish conquest of the Inca.

None of Diamond’s factual claims are very convincing. Which Yali was which does not matter, because Gewertz and Errington’s merely use the conversation with Yali as a set piece to raise a series of other claims about colonialism in Papua New Guinea, none of which Diamond addresses. Diamond offers as evidence that overpopulation was a factors for genocide in Rwanda a school teacher’s assertion that “The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.” Which seems to me to be an argument about inequality rather than population pressure — if it is not just a statement about shoes. Wilcox provides two citations to back up his claim that Chaco canyon was forested, while Diamond never cites his sources in the review or in Collapse, and so it is impossible to verify his claims. This also makes his claim that there is archaeological evidence of the death of the Greenland Norse impossible to verify. His claim that David Cahill’s paper is an “absurd rewriting” of Incan-Spanish relations seems to miss Cahill’s careful and, as far as I can tell, uncontroversial point that conquerors often keep local systems of social stratification intact and install themselves on top of them.

Now, it is surely unfair to ask a 1300 word review to exhaustively respond to all of the criticisms made in a 375 page book. Still, one can’t help but notice that the authors of QC make serious claims that throw Diamond’s entire reading of societal collapse into question, and Diamond’s response is to ignore the forest and call out a few trees. When people like Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo argue that Diamond’s claims about Rapa Nui are fundamentally mistaken, you expect such big-issue claims to merit a response.

Of course, Questioning Collapse was not perfect either

That said, the authors of QC do not always make it easy for readers to be swayed to their point of view. The editors claim that “participants committed themselves to setting aside abstruse academic prose and cumbersome in-text references in favor of a more user-friendly text.” Really? Can we blame Diamond for not lingering carefully over, for instance, Cahill’s prose when it contains sentences like this:

It encoded all the familiar generic facts of colonial conquests as seen by Europeans: the mutual incomprehension and marveling at the mirror-image alterities; the chasm between New World and Old World epistemologies, “true” rational knowledge against heathen superstition; clever Castilian against dullard Inca; true believers versus the unevangelized barbarians, at best seen as promising neophytes; asymmetrical technologies manifest in the flash of steel and the thrust of lance against bronze close-combat weapons, slingshot, cotton armor and buckler; European initiative against the kind of unquestioning obeisance associated with “oriental despotism.”

I am guessing the average reader will quit long before they get to the part of the sentence where they miss the Wittfogel reference. While several of the authors write clearly and passionately, on the whole Diamond still wins the contest for clear prose. In fact, many of the essays employ all the apparatus of scholarly prevarication: introductory sections reflecting on what it means to write for a popular audience, wider theoretical issues of contextualization, and so forth. You must wade through all this to get to the point where they actually talk about why they think Diamond is wrong.

Or you may not. One of the strangest things about this otherwise very ballsy collection is that many — maybe even most — of the articles do not actually quote Jared Diamond. Sometimes I think the authors are so immersed in the topic that they forget to leave signposts to the reader about what they are doing. Joel Berglund’s piece, for instance, appears to be a valuable detailed commentary on Diamond’s chapters on Norse Greenland, but only if you put the two books next to one another. For many readers it will seem like a tour of various facts about Norse Greenland which mentions Diamond at the start. Cahill’s paper often takes aim at “standard colonial tropes” of “indegnous dullards who ‘didn’t know what hit them’” or views in which “Andean civilization… becomes a kind of ‘unenlightened’ primitive polity”. The positions he put in scare quotes are certainly worth criticizing — but are they Diamonds? A close reading — and actual citation — of Diamond’s argument would have made the essay stronger, especially since Cahill’s data so obviously gainsays the claims Diamond actually does make. The best pieces — Hunt and Lipo’s and Wilcox’s, McNeil’s, and so forth — are very strong (disclosure: I share a department with Hunt) and other pieces could have profited by being as tightly written.

Above all, a central argument of QC is that the world is ‘complex’ and it would be better if popular audiences did not need to have it ’simplified’. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen reminds us, however, this simply will not fly. Public anthropology is, I’ve argued, the bar at the conference — when people tell you straight up and without hedging what they think is really going on in their papers. It is in the nature of the game to “dare to be reductive”. I think QC would have done better to explore how to reduce effectively, rather than lament the fact that such a move was necessary — or attempt to avoid making it at all.

Taking the fight to the streets?

Regardless of what you think about the particulars of Questioning Collapse, it establishes once and for all that mainstream academic authors consider Diamond’s work to be problematic. Coming from a major major press (Cambridge) with a roster of quality specialists, Questioning Collapse is undoubtedly Ivory Tower. If anything, it could have let down its hair a bit more. If only there were some way to reach a popular audience… to take the fight to the streets… in like… say… a blog…? Luckily, they have one, although it has not been updated regularly.

It seems to me QC’s blog could serve two purposes. First, it would also be an excellent place to begin a long and exceedingly detailed analysis of some of the particular factual claims Diamond makes — particularly those in the Nature review. This is the sort of intellectual spadework that publishers are not keen on, which should be made available to the public, and works well in small sub-essay size units which can be clearly written and do not take forever to read. Blog posts, in other words.

Second, Questioning Collapse is relatively expensive (US$30) and formally written — not ideal for spreading the word. The website could become a great location for remixed versions of the articles: piece available for download as teaching resources, or for the casual reader, where the authors cut right to the chase, free and open access, for anyone who is interested in reading them.

Conclusion

In sum, QC excels in empirical accuracy, not public outreach. While I find their arguments persuasive — in most cases, completely persuasive — I think they could have done a better job reaching a broader audience. There is a danger that their accounts of the social effects of Diamond’s work, and his personal/cultural motivations for writing could turn into ad hominem, which would be a shame. Because Diamond is a public figure, the proper course would be to be even more scrupulous in adhering to standards of professionalism and impartiality than a scholar normally would, even though the impulse is (I imagine) to go in rather the other dimension. From my point of view, the central issue has got to be the empirical adequacy of his claims.

As for Diamond, the impression I get of him is of a scholar who increasingly refuses to adhere to the best practices of the university, and who can get away with it because of the power and influence that comes from being in the public eye. Of course, there is nothing wrong with going AWOL from the academy if one wants to become a free-floating intellectual. But Diamond is not Carlos Castaneda, and his audience gives him credence because of his situation within the academy and his role as a translator of technical discourse. It is easy to become complacent when you’re, you know, an ultra-rich Pulitzer Prize-winning author (or so I imagine!). But one must resist the temptation to relax one’s standards. Both lay readers and his colleagues deserve better work than we see in Nature review.

In the seventies, Sahlins and Harris didn’t have the Internet to fall back on. Today, we are blessed with a means of communication that allow incensed scholars to argue endlessly in front of the entire planet! Now that the book is published, I look forward to seeing the authors of Questioning Collapse – and perhaps even Diamond himself? — move these issues forward.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the original text.

Essentially antagonistic with technoprogressive modernity while exploiting the simplicity, freedom, and access that comes with new media, these videos can be described as vanguard, counter, resistant, or subversive to capitalistic modernity while using the forefront of the sociotechnical tools of that capitalist technocracy. Our models of user-generated labor, from Shirkey and Benkler’s celebrations of social production to Terranova’s Marxist perspective on exploitative and ‘free’ labor, might not fit this un-capitalist media production practice. It is going to take a mix of something new to get it. But what?

I asked Varzi about jihadi videos: “These strike me as a rich source of information about a culture that is otherwise inaccessible to anthropologists: jihadi martyrs. How would you go about developing a critical anthropological methodology to reading these video texts?” Correctly but dangerously she stated she wouldn’t do it without an ethnographic component. I thought to myself: Let me get this right. I gotta hang out, like, deeply, with jihadi terrorists? As an anthropologist I cannot make a statement about jihadi video production practices without having first squeezed my way into their schedule and shared a few meetings over tea with my local jihadist? I’d love to, frankly, but I doubt I can network into their cliques. Are we going to let these remarkably reflexive, vocal “weapons of the weak” go unnoticed? If we can’t talk about these videos we are losing our disciplinary focus on subcultural expression and resistance and an opportunity to expand our methodological repertoire.

Jihadi video producers and new media firms, my focus, share little but extreme privacy. The similarities end there, but the problems for the ethnographer of either are identical: gaining access. My subjects are powerful. They have ideas that are worth millions in venture capital. Their lawyers are all about intellectual property. They live comfortable lives. They don’t need my cultural capital. They don’t need me around. Infrequently and for whatever reason, they invite me into their world. The Frontline documentary Behind Taliban Lines is a rare example that follows a single video journalist into the operations of the Taliban attempting to blow up a US convoy. This rarely happens in every context where a researcher wants access. Our own Rex thinks our focus should be on the subtle and not the savage, he’ll be happy to know that anthropologists usually are aren’t gutsy enough to pursue such inaccessible subjects.

What if I couldn’t meet these wealthy entrepreneurs in person? What if they were so private that participant observation was impossible? I would be forced to construct something anthropological through their public representations. Thankfully, my subjects produce a lot of media. They socially broadcast on Facebook and Twitter and have scheduled relations with the public at conferences. (Except for TED, which at $6000 a weekend excludes most.) But with or without ethnography, this project, like a hypothetical investigation of jihadi video producers, needs to happen. If we have to begin-and probably end-with texts, what will we do? We’ll need to first develop an anthropologically specific way of reading these video texts and other public media artifacts.

The time is now to revisit our present anthropological theories about the role of textual studies. Finding its most useful expression in reconstructive indigenous and postcolonial historiographies, texts have long been an essential part of our field. But have we fully fleshed out a spectrum of specific theories for each type of text? I am not interested in adjudicating the validity or truthfulness of this text versus that. Colonial documents, biographies, and census records need to be differentially theorized not as statements of fact or fiction but as culturally situated texts. What I am fishing for is a debate on whether the new digital documents can find a home in contemporary anthropological theory. What differentiates paper-based from Web 2.0 personal documents and text from video? Most importantly, how can we take a culturally distinct but necessarily distant visual text of war and conflict, consider its technical and productive online existence, not defer to speculation on auteur intentionality, be mindful of the artifacts that appear on screen, and extrapolate back to the producer’s culture?

More broadly, we need to ask ourselves how to do an anthropological study of ethnographically inaccessible objects: leadership of corporations, governments, terrorist cells, elite institutions. Anthropologist Jane Weddell’s recent book, The Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market” is a fine example. Ethical problems abound in all these projects. Just as Nancy Scheper-Hughes prospered, so will the anthropologist of video culture of martyrdom and other inaccessible objects.

Now O’Brien seems to have had enough. After a long silence, he has a new post up on the AAA-UNITE blog, where he writes that he is suffering from “commission-fatigue” —

the creeping death that sets in when you’ve been part of a successful organizing campaign that is co-opted and turned into a rubber stamp for the policies you’d been fighting.

At issue is this year’s conference in New Orleans. There is no strike in New Orleans, but the LRC members are angry that the conference is being held in a non-union hotel.

According to O’Brien, one of the things that happened after 2004 was a vote by the AAA Executive Board mandating that all AAA meetings be held in unionized venues. Now, you may disagree with this position, but it seems to have been arrived at as the result of a democratic process by the AAA leadership. For some reason, which O’Brien doesn’t explain, this policy was downgraded from being a “requirement” to being merely a “preference.” It isn’t clear if this is simply a difference of opinion, or if it was a change made by fiat by the AAA staff?

In either case, the choice of venue this year runs contrary to that preference/requirement, and the LRC is urging action. While O’Brien has personally decided to boycott the meeting, other members of the LRC are hoping to use the meetings to push forward for reforms. Specifically, they want to “change the conference organizing firm that AAA uses from the corporate-friendly Conference Direct to the labor-friendly INMEX.” They are urging individual sections to adopt proposals in favor of this change, and are planning to propose such a motion at the business meeting in New Orleans, as well as with the Executive Board. You can read the full letter over at the AAA-Unite post.

If you would like to sign on to the letter, please email Steve Striffler <striffler {at} hotmail(.)com> or Paul Durrenburger <pauldurren {at} verizon(.)net>.

The downside of this is that since it took me like a month to make the change it will probably take even longer for me to go back and clean up the entries I’ve written that have textile markup in them. So for a while — indeed, let’s face it, possibly forever — these pieces will look weird. Sorry — its just hard to find time to do website maintenance while also applying for tenure. And any rate that stuff is old news, right?

So Over It: The Philosophers’ Magazine interviewed Alan Sokal, the physicist most remembered for publishing a fake deconstructionist article in Social Text and then announcing that it was a hoax.  In addition to lamenting that he will, in all likelihood, only be remembered for that incident, Sokal lamented the anti-philosophical ethos of the  younger generation of physicists.  Where could they have gotten that from?

If there’s an idea floating in different corners of the blogosphere, count on Daniel Lende at neuroanthopology to put it all together.  That’s just what he did for this post on 5 rules for anthropologists to reach broader audiences.

The Economist has a short piece on gendercide- the systematic abortion or infanticide of female children.  Almost more troubling that some areas of the world have a 120:100 male to female birthrate is the fact that neither poverty, education, rural/urban locality, or national policy alone can account for the rise of such cases.

Disciplined Struggle: Ryan Anderson of ethnografix posted on anthropology vs. economics–that intellectual cage match within the human sciences to explain social behavior.  Economics get more recognition, Anderson reasons, because its basic premises lends itself to models that are easy to pick up and apply to any number of situations.  But anthropologists’ attention ethnographic detail shouldn’t be a reason to fold our arms and say the world doesn’t understand us.  But, Anderson argues, anthropologists have arguments in their toolbox that can scale up too.

HTS To Go: Maximillian Forte at Zero Anthropology posted on the latest development in the anthropomilitary strategy–the continuation of Human Terrain principles in Afghanistan without Human Terrain Teams.  Forte shows that more and more of this knowledge production will be shifted to actual soldiers or military contractors.

A Nice Piece of History: Ethnocuba has a great piece about Edward Tylor’s little-known excursion to Cuba before he went to Mexico and collected information for his first book, Anahuac.

Biologists Get All Biosocial: Has the world turned right side up?  Nicolas Wade at the New York Times reports on new research that is getting biologists to recognize the role culture has played in recent human evolution.

Adam will initiate an untitled monthly interview project where he will talk each month with someone doing provocative ethnographic research. An example would be this fascinating interview Adam did for the Archaeology Channel with Mercedes Doretti, a forensic archaeologist who worked at every known location of genocide and mass murder in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Welcome Adam! If readers have any suggestions for potential interviewees please contact him directly at rawbird {at} gmail(.)com

Her paper is a response to efforts at moving academics towards more open, less walled-off spaces of the type which has become vogue in the business world.

the university is joining the latest movement in the public sphere towards open-plan, multi-functional, flexible, innovative structures which are constantly equated with ‘openness’, ‘innovation’ and ‘transparency’ by design experts and architects

Hurdley debunks the simplistic association of open spaces with the lack of hierarchy, pointing out the resemblance to feudal halls and much-despised modernist housing. She also highlights the creative and flexible ways in which people actually use corridors. Especially interesting is how she depicts corridors as resisting a single point of view, such as that embodied in Foucault’s panopticon:

These could be called processions of openings and closings between different knowledge domains or worlds: proffering left-overs, knowing not to eat them; talking by the printer, taking it away; putting her in the picture, writing his name in the gap. Similarly, static or one-way concepts of surveillance, spectacle and visibility are recast and mobilised. An ‘apex viewpoint’ at the turn by the director’s office is no more than a corner to a student; only the student can spot his supervisor’s office light.

In the interview she also discussed just how resistant faculty are to such changes. Some threaten to quit upon hearing of such proposed changes, while in places where they have already been implemented, many professors work at home.

Also mentioned during the interview was the fact that academics often use the corridor to “cancel e-mails.” That is, as they walk down the corridor they yell out through the open doors of their colleagues that they should ignore the e-mail they’d sent out earlier that day. She remarked that this seemed to fly in the face of our assumptions about the speed and ease-of-use of electronic communication, but I can totally understand this kind of behavior. Nobody wants to be the person who sends out a stream of e-mails correcting mistakes in previous e-mails, much better to yell it out as you walk down the corridor…

You might have noticed the strong militarized thread running through this year’s list of Oscar nominated films. A not necessarily exhaustive list includes: The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, The Messenger, District 9, The Most Dangerous Man in America, Burma VJ, and Star Trek.

As a couple of anthropologists who study American soldiers, we’ve been struck by the much-ballyhoed showdown between Avatar and The Hurt Locker, particularly because there’s been relatively little said about the fact that the protagonists of both films are soldiers (Avatar’s Jake Sully is of course a marine of some fictitious and unspecified variety, but we’re going to take a leap and dispense with the service jargon).

After several years of largely unwatched and un-lauded contemporary American war films (Lions for Lambs, In The Valley of Ellah, Stop Loss, Dear John, Redacted, The Kingdom), it is worth taking a moment to ponder the significance of fictionalized American soldiers being at the center of such dramatically different films at a moment when actual American soldiers and Marines have, until just recently, largely vanished from the headlines. Soldiers are a key figure and symbol mediating public assumptions about, and relationships to, war violence. We wondered what the competing images in Avatar and The Hurt Locker suggest about those assumptions and relationships.

The two films are a study in contrasts on a number of levels. Avatar is a $400 million blockbuster that shattered director James Cameron’s own previous box office world record. The Hurt Locker had a budget of $16 million, and writer Mark Boals and director Katherine Bigelow self-produced it with funds from European backers because they were unsure if it would ever see a full theatrical release in the U.S.

Avatar was filmed mainly in front of green screens with its actors in motion-capture suits, a curious parallel to the film’s body-trading premise. Its incandescent alien flora and fauna serve as the backdrop for a moralizing tale drenched in liberal sentiment. The Hurt Locker was filmed on location in Amman, Jordan, less than 200 miles from the Iraqi border. Its palette is essentially sepia-tone, rounded out with blood and the black smoke of bomb detonations, and it’s an essentially plotless examination of war detached from political narrative.

James Cameron wrote the script for Avatar more than ten years ago, so its parallels with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan—insurgent locals, resource exploitation driven by corporate interests, and well-meaning “anthropologists” trying to forestall bloodshed (can you say HTS?)—arguably say as much about the abiding features of counterinsurgency war in general as about the current wars in particular. Mark Boals’ Hurt Locker script is based on his time as an embedded reporter with a U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team in Iraq, and yet the film is less ‘about’ the Iraq War than it is about the pleasures and pathologies of making and being exposed to violence.

Above all, the films depict radically different relationships between their protagonists, the violence they make and endure, and the greater logic of that violence. Avatar is a redemptive tale. In Jake Sully, the film gives us a curious blend of wronged veteran and cynical mercenary who transforms into pure-hearted revolutionary. The details of Jake’s tragic biography, his exceptional biometrics, and his mix of defeated nihilism and warrior’s code contextualize his decision first to do some things that are really bad (like helping to decimate a population and a planet to extract natural resources for profit) and then some that are really good (like coming to understand that this kind of exploitation should be stopped at all costs). The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, provides little context for its three EOD team protagonists beyond their dedication to, and enthusiasm for, their job. A few jumbled bits of background suggest that they are bound only tenuously to anyone or anything outside of the claustrophobic masculinity of military life. But this closed-off immediacy is a kind of ethical commentary in itself, as the film invites its audience to imagine the human-scale experience of a narratively overdetermined event—like war—that must be lived without the luxury of the kind of measured, meaningful and redemptive context that Avatar provides.

In Avatar, the combat violence is both the evidence and the means of evil deeds and the mechanism for righting wrongs. The humans fight to destroy and exploit, or even for the (clearly unwholesome) pleasure of killing. Cameron depicts the film’s mercenary grunts with an abundance of quasi-realistic contemporary detail—from their uniforms and hairstyles to their technical jargon and slang—but he also shows them as vulgar, sadistic, abelist, and racist, the dark side to Jake’s human vulnerability and empathy and his soldierly discipline and determination. For the Na’vi, on the other hand, violence against living things is imbued with righteousness and spiritual and existential significance. In both its thematic connotations and in its action, the film’s violence is utterly transparent. Good violence and bad violence are clearly meant to be distinguishable. And Sully’s perhaps accidental quotation of an Airborne slogan “death from above” to describe Na’vi aerial hunting suggests that good violence can safely blend militaristic and mystical attitudes. The bad guys strike first and leave destruction where there was peace and plenty. The ballet of arrows and rockets and soaring beasts and hovering aircraft that articulate and allegorize just and unjust violences is presented in excruciatingly elaborate technical detail, making it clear exactly how each act of destruction contributes to the morally freighted conflict. Violence always has a meaning and a message, its ramifications in the material world mapping point for point onto a moral one.

If Avatar is orderly and transparent, The Hurt Locker is unruly and opaque, both thematically and aesthetically, refusing the anchored of ethical certainty. The sense of devastation is generalized, and the temporality of before, during, and after doesn’t necessarily apply: violence happens and it’s happening now, arbitrarily bookended by the last days of these soldiers’ deployment. Even the seemingly orderly unfolding of the calendar—signposted throughout the film with periodic title cards showing number of days remaining—becomes disordered as the time of passing days is effaced by the racing seconds of a detonation device. Sergeant First Class James’ arrival in the unit at the beginning of the film finds an uncanny echo at its end when he arrives again. Time simultaneously loops back on itself and also counts down at the pace of a calendar and of a time bomb and of a rotation. The unfolding of time that can give violence a redemptive logic in Avatar is, in The Hurt Locker, shattered and fragmented.

It is this fragmentation, rather than any solid explanatory framework that characterizes the violence in The Hurt Locker. There are threats everywhere, but the only identifiable enemies are at a distance—seen through a scope from hundreds of meters away—or utterly absent—the bombmakers who leave their creations for the soldiers to find. When James and his fellow soldiers Sanborn and Eldridge return fire on a shooter they cannot see, the script, camerawork and editing keep the shooter obscured for several minutes—an eternity by action movie standards. When a bomb detonates on the ground next to an unsuspecting soldier, he literally disappears in a cloud of smoke. Just as scenes of violence are deliberately evacuated of all but a physical intelligibility, The Hurt Locker makes no direct reference to the larger political and strategic logic of the war. In contrast to Avatar’s sweeping scale and redemptive violence, The Hurt Locker’s visual and moral universe is one in which violence resolves little, but is its own dilemma and its own reward.

None of this even begins to touch on some of the other themes that cross these films: the gendering of violence; the place of capitalism and entrepreneurship; the competing modes of bodily discipline and decay; notions of “cultural difference”; or countless aspects of technical execution and visual style. Clearly the contrasts of these two films, and the soldiers in them are good to think with. Our thinking has left us with a few questions about these portrayals of soldiers and war violence and what they might mean.  We submit them here for your consideration:

• Is there any way of squaring the fragmentary and contingent quality of violence in The Hurt Locker and the ethics of grand ideas displayed in Avatar? And in either case, what does this mean for how we think about soldiers who carry out violence?
• What can we glean from both films’ portrayal of a deeply ambivalent relationship between the soldier and the military institution that he or she serves?
• What is the relationship between the very bodily solder and other inanimate or semi-animate instruments of war? In what circumstances does the soldier’s bodilyness dispose him to be read as just a body, and in what circumstances does it round out his humanity and heroism by serving as a sign of his discipline and prowess?
• Can soldiers ever also be seen as regular folks, and do they ever get to “be normal”? Or do they always have to choose between the chaos of war and a home that is (in one way or another) made strange?

UPDATE: Updated post to include Zoë H. Wool’s bio and byline.

However, as Lévi-Strauss might have predicted, show where people go all over the world and eat/meet people run aground on the fact that most people are not all that different, since all foods/people are just combinations of each other. How many times can Tony Bourdain discover street vendors who sell sausage? Or the astounding fact that “this country also has flat bread/stew/a staple starch”? As a result I always feel these shows are constantly being ground down by the very hyperbolic nature which always requires them to push up against their edges.

I think an important part of being an anthropologist is that you are not deeply attracted to savagery, but rather something I’d call ’subtlety’: an appreciation for the little things in life. It comes from an awareness of them, all of them, which helps you put things in context: why that flat bread that way? How does metalworking in this place mean the dough gets put on top of one sort of thing rather than another? This for Boas this was a German ideographic impulse in which Lévi-Strauss, I reckon, saw a certain family resemblance with his own Frenchified impulses to connoisseurship. In America it has a populist tinge.

I think that one of the most important things anthropologists can do (and I’m thinking here of American anthropologists speaking to Americans since that is where I’m from) is to take people’s initial expectation that we are savagery experts and use it to help them see the subtlety of life. Doing so means helping them get inside ethnographic examples and minutiae.  Compare, for example, Andrew Zimmer eating Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches on camera to Dan Jurasfky’s awesome Language of Food blog. You don’t have to already be a total geek to watch in amazement as he traces fish and chips around the world from Persia to England — its a fascinating journey in and of itself.

I say this because I worry that anthropologists often think that the public wants to see them studying ’sexy’ topics like black market arms dealers, the global market in organs, transvestite hookers, and so on and so forth. I think these are all interesting topics but in lauding these topics as examples of something ‘the public will find interesting’ I feel us inexorably slipping into savagery mode rather than subtlety mode. So bring on the local staple starch and yet more cousin terminology — and a subtle approach to life that appreciates them!

For Your Listening Pleasure: BBC Radio is streaming an audio report chronicling the story of Malinowski and the invention of field work.  Some things will make you raise your eyebrow, while other comments will make you roll your eyes.  Features interviews with Adam Kuper amongst others.

Anthropologists Do it Better: Tony Waters (a sociologist by training) from ethnography.com writes on why the International Studies Association (ISA) just doesn’t do it for him, and how AAA’s is where it’s at.  The best part of the story is when Waters is pulled into a meeting with a bunch of government bureaucrats on providing humanitarian aid to Nigeria.  He describes it this way:

The other NGO guy and I were the only ones there not in suit and tie.  We were also the only ones not dropping names of White House contacts, or mumbling about how we had such-and-such a security clearance from the US government but didn’t know what was happening in Nigeria.

Yeah, I’d stick to AAAs too.

‘Merck’y Transactions: On Somatosphere, guest contributor Ari Samsky posted a piece on the multinational pharamaceutical companies’ donations of medicine to the global south and the formulation of a ’scientific sovereignty’ that results.

Sound Off: Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a brief piece for the New Yorker online on Rush Limbaugh’s race-baiting insinuation that Barack Obama turns African American English on and off in order to appeal to different constituencies.  (Limbaugh went as far as accusing the president of reading ‘aks’ off the teleprompter.)  For a further analysis, see this piece on Language Log (and thanks to the Log for originally linking to the Henzberg piece).

Morning Cup of Evolutionary Psychology (Now with slightly less of that eugenic aftertaste):  You might disagree with the reasoning, results, and even the premise of this Time Article linking liberalism, atheism, and monogamy to a higher IQ in men.  But, at least some readers will also get a sense of self-satisfaction.

Want to share something with SM readers?  Post in comments below, or email.

In any case, take a second look at the discussion, if you have a chance.

Getting It Published by William Germano

Germano’s book does not actually have a series of easy-to-follow steps that will lead to being instantly published, but it does help give you context for what decisions are made in publishing and how they are made. It’s a valuable reality check for someone looking to publish. Like I say I’ve read it and found it really helpful.

There are a few other books that the editor didn’t mention but which I’ve also gotten some mileage out of that may be off the academic radar that I thought I’d mention as well. The first is

Making The Perfect Pitch: How To Catch A Literary Agent’s Eye, by Katharine Sands

Of the bintillion ‘how to get your first novel published’ books out there this is the one that I think is actually worthwhile. It’s quite ethnographic, actually — it contains numerous five-to-ten page reminiscences by authors and agents about how to write one-page pitch letters to attract a literary agent. It’s a frank, engaging book that features people finally laying down on the page all the complaining and advising they’ve been doing for years. There is no real overview or formula or big idea — just a chance to see some good (and bad!) examples and to climb into these people’s habituses. Habitoi? Habtiusi? Even though we academics don’t do agent-based publishing its still a great read.

Finally, in distant third is:

Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath

I have to admit that I am not a big fan of “books Lifehacker is breathlessly enthusiastic for this week”, and particularly not books like this which stray into social science territory. In this book the Heaths attempt to boil down into a simply formula the six things that supposedly are memorable ideas have. To a lot of people it will seem like a fluffy mix of cognitive psychology and folklore studies that could have been ten pages long. Bu I have to admit that ever since I’ve read this book I find myself unwillingly recognizing the utility of their framework. I’ll be explaining how ‘theoretical contribution’ is measured by the NSF and find myself saying “it’s like the ‘unexpectedness’ criteria from Made to Stick” or be talking about a dissertation proposal and say “it’s really got ’story’”. So maybe there is something to it after all. At any rate if you just go to the book’s website you can check out the six principles and if you give them your email address you can download a bunch of stuff and just skip the book entirely. So a guarded thumbs up for this one as well.

I know there are other books on publishing out there — I think ‘the art of abstracting’ is a strange a lovely hommage to the work of being a full-time absracter, for instance — and would be interested in hearing other people’s recommendations.