What is a Silo?

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

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

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

Structural Silos

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

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

Intellectual Silos

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

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

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

Why Silos?

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

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

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

Solving Silos?

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Russell Berman] and five other professors at the university have produced a paper that calls for a major rethinking at Stanford — a reduction in the time taken to graduate by Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, and preparing them for careers within and beyond the academy. The professors at Stanford aren’t just talking about shaving a year or so off doctoral education, but cutting it down to four or five years — roughly half the current time for many humanities students.

This includes getting an MA (they suggest a two year review to decide “which students will advance to candidacy, and which will receive a terminal M.A.”). Now I can’t remember where I read it, but I believe that the average time to Ph.D. in anthropology is roughly what they say it is in the humanities: about nine years. How feasible is it that this time could be cut in half?

Part of their plan involves making better use of the summers: “Unfunded summers impede progress.” I can see how this might have speeded things up for me, maybe shaving off a year or even two, since not only would I not have had to work summers, but funding would have made it possible to start my fieldwork sooner. Lets say students receive full funding and aren’t required to teach (as I was) and I think one could go from an average of 9 years to 7. Of course, the reality is that funding is getting cut these days so I remain skeptical that we’ll see many universities increasing funding even if it means getting students out sooner.

Can we get it below 7? At my four-field program I took three years of courses. The only way I can see that being cut down is if they eliminated the four-field approach. That would be unfortunate. While I resented it at the time, I’ve really come to appreciate my four-field training in subsequent years. Actually five fields because we also had a visual anthropology program with its own requirements. But even if we are talking about a straight cultural anthropology program anthropologists still need pretty broad training. Usually we need additional courses on the language, culture and history of the region we intend to study – often outside of our own department. Language study alone can take at least an extra year (or two). On top of that we might need to brush up on an area of study related to our research topic, such as immunology, second language education, environmental science, etc.

And then there is fieldwork. I’ve seen some recent Ph.D. thesis from universities which have instituted drastically reduced time-to-Ph.D. constraints and you could really see it in the mismatch between the theory and the ethnography. It might be possible to do fieldwork in a few months if you’ve already spent a year or two somewhere during grad school, but I don’t think it works for graduate research. And if you don’t get a chance to really “be there” as a graduate student when will you have that opportunity? As a professor trying to get tenure?

Three years of course work, a year of language study, a year in the field, plus at least a year or two for exam prep, proposal writing, etc. not to mention the dissertation… I just don’t see how anyone could do it in less then seven years unless they were doing the research in their own backyard, already spoke the language, and had already gotten more than enough specialized training in the culture and topics they are studying before starting an Anthropology degree. And remember, seven years is predicated upon 12 months of full funding for each of those seven years. Have to work summers and part-time to make ends meet and we get back up to the current average…

I want to talk about the role of ethnic difference in narrative, but since Rex brought up the issue of bodies, let me first note that one of the interesting things about The Culture is that unlike the many other “highly advanced alien species” discussed by Rex in his post, bodies are very important to The Culture. In this post-singularity world people can back themselves up or choose to live entirely virtual lives, but most choose to have bodies anyway. These bodies are enhanced, to be sure: they have neural laces to tie them to the co-evolved artificial Minds which run their space ships, and they have extra glands which give them whatever drugs they might like at a mere thought, but they are still bodies. Over their long lifespans they can choose to be male or female at will, and many go through several changes over a lifetime. The Minds too can take on human avatars, and the nature of these avatars is an important reflection of their personalities, although we are frequently reminded that they are not human. For instance, they can eat and defecate, but they don’t have to and the food which is passed through their bodies is still edible since it hasn’t really been digested. We are even told that some humans like to eat avatar-digested food. But then who understands humans?

Getting back to ethnicity and narrative… let me start with Special Circumstances, an organization which figures prominently in The Culture novels. Here’s an explanation from Wikipedia:

Special Circumstances is part of a larger fictional Culture organization called Contact, which coordinates Culture interactions with (and in) other civilizations. SC exists to fulfill this role when circumstances exceed the moral capacity of Contact, or where the situation is highly complex and requires highly specialized skills… Special Circumstances also does the ‘dirty work’ of the Culture, a function made especially complicated by the normally very high ethical standards the Culture sets itself. SC acts in a way that has been compared with the democratizing intentions of real-world liberal intent on overcoming the world’s (and especially other nation’s) evils by benign interference.

One of the things that makes The Culture books so interesting is the deep ambivalence Banks has for his Special Circumstances heroes. While they have no material interest in delving into the affairs of other societies, it is clear that their motivations are not entirely selfless. They are driven in equal parts by a desire to “improve” these other cultures as well as their own boredom. Yes, they usually win in the end, for the betterment of all concerned. One could thus argue that SC is an argument for liberal interventionism. But I think it is much more about the need for good stories.

SC is important to The Culture novels because the world of The Culture is a rather boring utopia. There is no money, no discrimination, no real politics, etc. For this reason, for anything interesting to happen it must happen at the fringes of Culture, at the point of contact with other (usually less developed) civilizations. This interests me because it makes clear how important contact (or Contact) is for narrative. I also think it explains why people get so defensive when anthropologists point out the underlying racism implicit in various fictional worlds.

Take, for example, the Dothraki of Game of Thrones:

The Dothraki are dark, with long hair they wear in dreadlocks or in matted braids. They sport very little clothing, bedeck themselves in blue paint, and, as depicted in the premiere episode, their weddings are riotous affairs full of thumping drums, ululations, orgiastic public sex, passionate throat-slitting, and fly-ridden baskets full of delicious, bloody animal hearts. A man in a turban presents the new khaleesi with an inlaid box full of hissing snakes. After their nuptials, the immense Khal Drogo takes Daenerys to a seaside cliff at twilight and then, against her muted pleas, takes her doggie-style.

Now, I think a lot of the problem is that the Dorthraki are intentionally a “hodgepodge creation”:

George R.R. Martin has written , “I have tried to mix and match ethnic and cultural traits in creating my imaginary fantasy peoples, so there are no direct one-for-one correspodences [sic]. The Dothraki, for example, are based in part on the Mongols, the Alans, and the Huns, but their skin coloring is Amerindian.”

I think a lot of the problem is Martin’s reliance on the worst stereotypes about nomadic peoples rather than more historically accurate accounts. For instance, one popular history of Genghis Khan emphasizes the importance of the Mongols in the creation of the “modern world.”

But I don’t want to talk about what is wrong with Martin’s Dorthraki so much as why so many people get upset when scholars point out these problems. I think it is because of a feeling that good stories need good “others” and that without difference, including different levels of civilization, one can’t have a good narrative. The anthropologist in me wants to reply that recreating Tylor and Morgan’s stages of civilization in narrative form serves to reproduce the ideological foundations of racism is even if it isn’t directed at any particular ethnic group, but the fan of science fiction and fantasy novels in me understands that such is the stuff that (most) fantasy worlds are made of. Fictional others allow us to explore the limits of our own humanity. Still, I think The Culture novels show that we can do better, that we can ask more of our imagined worlds. But even Banks’ novels still rely upon a social darwinian view of galactic development, with each civilization necessarily going through the various stages of development, with only minimal interference by the more developed societies. I say this not so much to criticize Banks but to point out how hard it is to escape from such narrative frameworks, even in (or especially in?) stories that otherwise push the boundaries of what it means to be human.

Addendum: I posted it to Twitter, but I wanted to link again to a recent interview in Wired with anthropologist Kathryn Denning who “studies the very human way that scientists, engineers and members of the public think about space exploration and the search for alien life.” I think she has some really interesting things to say about our discourses about contact with alien life.

Take a second to think about it: why do we assume that the more advanced you get, the less body you will have?

Star Trek is a product of its time featuring all the teleological unilinear evolution you could shake a stick at — more Leslie White and Herbert Spencer than Julian Steward and Charles Darwin. I understand that it views all life-forms as being located on a Victorian continuum with Papua New Guinea on one end and NASA on the other. But even in a world obsessed with technological improvement, since when did the body become something that, technically, it would be better for us to get rid of? I really want to hammer home the incredibly non-obvious nature of this question in: what is technologically backwards about having a body?

The answer, of course, is that contemporary Eurochristian cultures have a long history of viewing the body as the dirty, uncontrolled, appetitive fleshvelope that our pure, divine souls have been crammed into. All of the Star Trek tropes of floating pools of light entering our bodies to possess our engineers and lieutenant commanders; their need to lower themselves by using physical speech to communicate; the promise that someday we might be able to comprehend the infinite majesty of the universe once we’ve joined them…. totally different from angels, amirite?

One of the oddities of anthropology is that once you’ve tuned into a cultural pattern, you see it everywhere — that’s how you know you’ve gotten your analysis right. But for most Americans, say, it takes quite a lot of exposure to American and British culture to see the big picture. Not just because you are too close (although that is a problem) but because you spend most of your life going to work, cooking dinner, etc. and not reading Sacvan Berkovitch and Perry Miller. Or for that matter Madame Blavatsky.

And yet it is a strange, very culturally specific idea that we are more truly ourselves when we are out of our bodies rather then when we are in them. Many people in other cultures think that they are their bodies — a very sensible proposition indeed given the available evidence. It takes analysis and comparison to understand this, even though the examples of the pattern occur regularly on Netflix. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

We spend some time doing kinship diagrams. I show them my family and lead them through exercises where they chart their own families. Such diagrams are passe I guess, but for me they hold quirky charm not unlike the lost art of diagramming sentences. I can throw them up pretty quickly on a white board and we use them in class to help visualize social relationships.

Students find patrilineal descent, which flows from fathers to offspring, to be somewhat intuitive. After all they behave in a similar way to our tradition of passing down surnames and students can anticipate how patrilineality might coincide with a a socio-economic system that favors powerful fathers and husbands. But matilineal descent which flows from mothers to offspring are strange to them, its illogic manifest most clearly in the responsibilities for discipline granted to resource providers such as uncles and brothers, with weaker bonds ascribed to biological fathers.

Matrilineality seems exotic to students, but in fact some examples of it can easily be found in one of the most ancient charter documents of “Western Civilization.” Bereishit (Genesis), the first book of the Torah (Old Testament).

I don’t know if you’ve ever just sat down and read a whole lot of the Bible. My knowledge of it is fairly limited. I am familiar with Genesis which is distinguished by its engaging mythic narratives that rewards rereading. These incredibly evocative and powerful stories caught the imagination of underground cartoonist R.Crumb and inspired him to complete a fully illustrated Book of Genesis. The Crumb illustrations, thick and fleshy, help out to humanize the characters especially for people who aren’t already familiar with the stories.

Now granted, what I’m about to do is not the usual way one reads Genesis. I’m only doing this in order to make some points about matrilineality, not to claim some sort of religious insight.

 
Overview

Some scholars estimate that the Old Testament was first written down in 1000 BCE. Prior to that the stories almost certainly existed as oral traditions, so their true age is unknown. According to some they may have roots in ancient Summerian myths. Genesis covers a lot of ground that is outside our scope. What we’re focusing on here is the middle portions of the Book which follows the lives of one family all descended from a man named Abraham.

As you might guess the stories mostly focus on the men of the family: Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph. Simply put there are not very many female characters. But if you read Genesis from the point of view of the few females that are there some remarkable similarities to matrilineal kinship patterns arise.

I already told you I’m not a Biblical scholar, okay?

 
The original love triangle: Sarah gives Hager to Abraham

Abraham’s wife, Sarah, cannot have children and so she gives her slave girl, Hager, to her husband. Predictably this ends in tragedy as Sarah grows jealous of Hager for giving birth. She chases Hager off, but she promptly returns after an angel of the Lord directs her to do so.

Later there is a miracle and Sarah does conceive despite her old age. This son is to be Isaac. Ultimately Sarah instructs Abraham to banish Hager and his first born son Ishmael. This is the mythic fission of the Abrahamic religions as Ishmael becomes the ancestor of many Islamic prophets, including Mohammed. The line that issues from Sarah through Isaac becomes the Hebrews. So the Muslims and the Jews have the same father but different mothers!

In fact Abraham outlives Sarah and after her death he has many other wives. And although children by these women are descended from Abraham, Abraham’s wealth and God’s blessing go to Isaac. Thus the chosen people, the Jews, are – following a matrilineal pattern – the descendents of Sarah. Others who are the descendants of Abraham by other women are excluded.

 
Rebekah’s Bride Price

In the next story Abraham wants to find a suitable wife for his son Isaac. He doesn’t want Isaac messing around with any of the local girls, so he sends one of his servants back to his homeland to the family of his brother, Nahor. The servant returns with Rebekah, technically Isaac’s first cousin once removed. What’s interesting to us in this context is how he acquires her.

So Abraham’s man makes this long journey until he finally arrives at Nahor’s compound. There’s this pretty young woman at the well and she shows her hospitality by drawing water for him and his camels. Abraham’s servant is impressed with her kindness and gives her gifts which she immediately takes back to show to her mother and brother.

Laban, Rebekah’s brother, is intrigued that there’s some rich stranger on the outskirts of town giving gifts to his sister so he goes to check it out. It’s the brother that negotiates the terms of marriage for his sister, the father is nowhere mentioned. Abraham’s servant pays Laban and Rebekah’s mother with more gifts and they reciprocate with a feast in celebration of the arrangement.

This is very much in keeping with matrilineal kinship patterns because the brother is in a position of authority relative to the sister and the bride’s mother is the recipients of the bride price. For those familiar with the patrilineal tradition of the father giving away the bride this is an interesting reversal.

 
Shit gets too heavy for Jacob

In the next story Rebekah gives birth to twins Esau and Jacob.

Twin brothers Esau and Jacob are like perfect opposites. Esau is big and burly, he’s covered in manly body hair and is a successful hunter. Jacob is a mild mannered kind of guy, he spends a lot of time indoors working with his mom. The parents play favorites too. Isaac has a taste for game so he loves the first born Esau best, but Rebekah loves Jacob and together they hatch this elaborate plan to divest Esau of his father’s inheritance and God’s blessing.

Once Esau discovers what Jacob is up to, that he has successfully stolen his father’s blessing, he is pissed. He threatens to kill Jacob, which we have to suspect would be no match – this big strapping hunter against mama’s boy. What do you do when things get too hot around the patrilineage? Go take refuge with your mother’s brother!

As members of the same matrilineage Laban graciously receives Jacob as if he were his own son. Laban also appears to be the primary property owner in this land and is probably overjoyed to have gained a new employee for his ranching operation.

 
Jacob scores a threesome
So Jacob goes to work for his mother’s brother while things cool off back at his dad’s place. Laban asks him “What should your wages be?” when Jacob really has his eyes on Laban’s daughters (his first cousins). There’s Leah who has pretty eyes and then there’s Rachael, who has everything else.

I really like how Crumb draws her with some va-va-voom!

Jacob strikes a deal with Laban. He will work for seven years to pay Rachael’s bride price.

Seven years pass, the wedding is held and Lo! That’s not the woman I thought I married! Are we to take it that the bride’s face was veiled? At any rate it seems Laban has pulled a fast one on his nephew.

Laban feeds Jacob a line about how it is their tradition that the younger daughter should not be married before the elder and he swallows it. Still his love for Rachael is so great that he’s willing to work another seven years to marry the other sister! This double cross comes back to haunt Laban in the next story.

Now Jacob is nestled in real tight with this matrilineage. Having married sisters this insures that all of his children from either wife will be on the same team.

 
The sisters side against the father

It seems like things are going pretty well for Jacob now. After overcoming some trickeration from his uncle/ father in-law, Jacob’s wives are blessed with many children. He even seems to benefit from a little sibling rivalry between the sisters as they give to him their handmaiden’s much as Sarah gave Hager to Abraham.

By this point in the story Jacob has been in Laban’s house for many years and the fact is not lost on him that his labor is making his uncle wealthier at his own expense. Not unlike the plot to defraud Esau of his inheritance Jacob conceives of an elaborate conspiracy to fleece Laban of his flock and then flee back to the land of his father, Isaac. And just as he needed his mother Rebekah to execute the last heist, he needs the assistance of Leah and Rachael. When he shares his plans with them Jacob finds he has no trouble at all turning the sisters against their father.

So the plan is put into action and Jacob looks to make off with most of Laban’s herd. When Laban discovers the deal is going down he runs out into the field to try to put a stop to it. With Laban out of the house Rachael sneaks back in and steals some of his household idols. This only infuriates Laban more and Jacob gives him permission to search their tents to recover his idols unaware that his own wife has taken them.

Then there’s this fascinating scene where Laban storms into Rachael’s tent. Taking the idols and hiding them under some blankets Rachael sits down on top of them and pretends to be on her period. Laban retreats. The matrilineage has succeeded in appropriating the domestic gods.

 
Dinah is raped and the matrilineage sides against the father (again)

Like I said there’s not a whole of stories in Genesis with prominent female characters, but there is one more that will serve our purposes here. After Jacob deserts Laban and reconciles with Esau he becomes a successful patriarch and keeper of flocks.

Being that he’s married to sisters all of his offspring would belong to the same matrilineage. Here we are interested in how Dinah’s brothers react to her assault by Shechem Prince of the Hivites

Not cool Shechem. You’re supposed to marry the girl and then take her virginity. Not the other way around!

Hamor, his father, knows he son has screwed up and so the two of them head out to Jacob’s camp to tray and make amends. But in the story Jacob the father of Dinah “keeps his peace” and instead her brothers take charge.

I love this scene because its like something right out of Levi-Strauss. Here are two groups of men engaged in politics using women as a tokens of exchanges.

Dinah’s brothers have other ideas, however. Remember, these guys are Hebrews. Its unacceptable to them that Shechem would be uncircumcised. Eew, gross! There is no way you are touching our sister. Unless… snip snip.

Have you guessed that this is leading up to an elaborate conspiracy whereby one group exacts revenge on another? Good for you! The brothers convince Hamor and Shechem that they will exchange women and build up their alliances if they have all the men of their village circumcised simultaneously. Then while the Hivites are convalescing from their wounds Dinah’s brothers come in and KILL THEM ALL!!

When Jacob hears about this he is pissed.

Guys, he seems to be saying, you’re making me look really bad here. But its too late. The matrilineage has sided against the patrilineage yet again.

I hope you enjoyed this. My plane is boarding so I’ll have to leave it here. Happy Mother’s Day! I love you mom!

Wunderkit is basically Facebook for Getting Things Done: Like Facebook you log in, create a profile, and friend your friends. But Wunderkit offers a twist as well: your homepage features a ‘dashboard’ where you post status updates like in Facebook, but it also has a to-do list attached, as well as an area where you can create notes (more features are apparently in the works). And — this is the kicker — you can create ‘projects’ which have their own homepage, complete with task lists and notes. Then people working on the project with you can friend the project and you can all collaborate.

In an academic context, projects can range from dissertation proposals under way to articles you are coauthoring to creating comps lists to working on edited volumes. The genius of the system is that once you are on it with your friends, it becomes a cheap and easy way to collaborate on tons of different things without having to start from scratch every time you want to get something up and rolling.

I’ve had very good success so far using Wunderkit with my students to work on class projects and so forth. It takes a bit of habituation, but it is really great to be able to log on once a day and find out that someone has read an article you asked them to read, or has created a to-do item that you have to fulfill — the act of advising stops being nebulous and turns into a concrete series of next-steps and progress updates.

So that is awesome, at least for me. But the really exciting thing for me is the way that Wunderkit allows me to institute my beloved ‘article a day’ philosophy.

You see, I don’t have to fill my status updates with the newest latest about what I ate for lunch of how much it sucks that Maurice Sendak died. I already have Facebook and Twitter for that. Because this social network is for work only, my status updates are what article I read that day and a one sentence summary of that’s article’s main claims. For instance: “read ‘Ontologically Challenged’, James Laidlaw’s review of Morton Pederson’s book. An concise and convcing critcism of the unecessarily baroque VdC-style theory of perspectivism.”

Posting article-a-day status updates is really pretty amazing. First, it forces you to actually read an article a day, a habit that might otherwise be more often honored in the breach than in the observance. Second, because you know you will have to summarize your reading, you really end up focusing on your reading and developing the extremely valuable skill of boiling down an article to its essentials. Third, it makes note taking easy because you can cut and paste your status updates into your notes database. And finally, when everyone in your personal network starts doing this, you feel like your intellectual life is getting rich, exciting, and communal.

There are a number of drawback to the system as I currently use it. First, Wunderkit is still in beta and you really feel that working with the site. Sometimes it stops working altogether. At other times it works but items occasionally disappear from various sidebars where they are supposed to live. Even when Wunderkit does work, the development team is still working on usability issues: it is often confusing where status updates are supposed to be made and where they will appear when they are made. Often I miss important updates from the people in my network because I didn’t drill down to their personal homepage to check the status updates.

But — hopefully! — these things will improve. And in the end the real value of Wunderkit is only partially tied to its affordances. In a world of mandatory enrollment in social networking sites is undertaken just to maintain your Google juice, it’s nice to have a place where you can get down to work with your friends and colleagues in private. I’m hoping that the people at Wunderkit can refine the service to let that happen. But even if they don’t, having a place where you can surveil yourself and feel like you’ve gotten credit for reading something is reward enough. I love Wunderkit and look forward to seeing how it can be further bent to our nefarious anthropological purposes.

Who is the audience for academic knowledge? When does that audience include not just fellow academics, but also the public? These questions are harder to answer than they should be. Our courses require enrollment and tuition. Our writings require effort to find and afford and read. Our conferences tend to be closed to outsiders and sometimes even to other scholars. As a profession, we simply do not have spaces where we regularly talk with an interested public about our research.

This is a story about academics silencing a public audience. It is about Ivory Tower condescension and how I once defended Adam Yauch’s right to ask a question. Here is what happened:

In April 2002, I participated in a conference on Tibet and the Cold War at Harvard University featuring distinguished scholars of China, India, and Tibet. The conference was a perfect fit with my research on Tibet and the CIA and was fantastic in many ways, until it wasn’t. 

Around 100 Tibetans attended the two-day conference. These were regular community members of all ages, college students and older people, whole families even, and they outnumbered the “academic” audience. For me, it was an unexpected but welcome opportunity to present my research to an audience composed of both academics and the general public. Yet there was discomfort from a handful of other participants about having a non-academic audience. Why was this? Did they think a section of the audience was going to start yelling “Free Tibet” and rush the stage?

Cold War Tibet is a political topic, and sparks flared up periodically between panelists. For their part, the audience—Tibetans and non-Tibetans, academics and the general public—respectfully engaged the presenters, asking questions and offering comments. Then on Day Two controversy arose when a member of the audience asked a question of the panelists. The audience member was Adam Yauch and his question was relatively simple. Why, he wanted to know, did the Chinese care so much about Tibet. “I know why Tibet is an emotional issue for Tibetans,” he said, “but why is Tibet such an emotional issue for the Chinese?”

Who is Adam Yauch? I’m not sure if many of the conference participants knew who he was. In the context of the conference, it didn’t really matter. But it mattered to me. While to my Tibetan friends, Adam Yauch was often simply “Adam,” to me he was MCA of the Beastie Boys.

I was in high school when the Beastie Boys’ debut album Licensed to Ill came out in 1986. In the twenty-five years since, the Beastie Boys have been a consistently incongruous and fun part of our musical and cultural landscape. In the 1990s, Adam Yauch became a practicing Tibetan Buddhist. He co-founded the Milarepa Foundation to support Tibetan artists, and also started the hugely successful Tibetan Freedom Concerts that ran globally from 1996-2003, raising money for and generating awareness about Tibet among young people and musicians. His sincere participation in the Tibetan community extended to his attendance at the Harvard conference. He was there anonymously, not in any sort of “Sabotage”-style disguise, but just incognito as himself at an academic conference. He was quiet until close to the end when he posed his question.

Before anyone on the panel could reply, one of the conference organizers—a Harvard professor—stood up and said forcefully that this was an “academic conference” and that “emotional” questions would not be entertained. He made it clear we were here to discuss real politics in an academic, dispassionate manner. That is: in discussing politics we were to be apolitical.

This was wrong on so many levels.

1. It was the bluntest academic putdown of the public I have ever personally witnessed, an appalling example of academic snobbery.

2. It was also flat-out incorrect; Adam Yauch’s question was entirely academic. It was a question about nationalism, the über-topic of the 1990s, including for cultural, historical, and political scholarship on both Tibet and China.

3. It was an abdication of the political, of the responsibility to speak to difficult issues. And, it was a renunciation of our responsibility as scholars to dialogue with an engaged public.

Immediately after the organizer’s dismissal of the question, I and several other panelists spoke up: the question from the audience was legitimate, this was something scholars absolutely do study, and about which we had things to say. Despite our comments, something had shifted. The audience had been disciplined and spoken down to; the message was ‘you can listen, but we might not let you speak if we don’t like what you have to say.’

At the next break, I went over to Adam Yauch and introduced myself, apologizing for what had just happened and saying that his question was indeed academic, an important and legitimate query, and a question that scholars also ask. He was incredibly gracious, saying he hadn’t meant to cause any friction. We chatted for a short while, talking about China, Tibet, and the value and politics of audience participation in academic conferences. It was a serious and thoughtful conversation with someone who in that moment was simply a member of the public audience, not a famous musician.

This incident has bothered me for a long time. Dismissing individuals who turn to us as experts for answers to their questions is not right. We have multiple spaces where academics can and do speak privately amongst ourselves, and these are important spaces. But we need also to speak publicly. We need to create and embrace occasions to speak directly with communities interested in our research. We need to do this even if it feels uncomfortable; we need to do it especially if it feels uncomfortable.

Ten years have passed since the Harvard conference. I had not planned on writing about what happened there; it was an ugly side of academia and involved a celebrity; the whole thing had felt surreal. Then word came on Friday that Adam Yauch died of cancer after three years fighting the disease. I thought of his music and his commitments, and about his question about people’s attachments to things, about China’s attachment to Tibet, and about our responsibilities as scholars, and I decided it was time to write. This post is a tribute to someone who was our perfect public audience member. Interested in the topic, he came to the conference. Curious to learn more, he asked a question. Committed to the issue, he pressed on after the conference, for as long as he could.

RIP Adam Yauch (August 5, 1964-May 4, 2012).

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado and author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Duke University Press, 2010). She wrote this post while listening to Paul’s Boutique and Ill Communication.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CS: You need a lot of friends.

Growing up in Texas I always had trouble keeping Cinco de Mayo and Diez y Seis straight. To my mind the former was in commemoration of a colonial event, the defeat of Spain maybe, and the latter marked the date of the Mexican Revolution. Or maybe I had it backwards? And while Diez y Seis might warrant a baile folklorico demonstration or a performance from the high school mariachi band in the state capital, Cinco de Mayo was marked by the ritual of going out to a Mexican restaurant for dinner.

In college in Florida the Caribbean immigrants and the children of immigrants I came to know were just learning about Mexican American culture, so the observation of Cinco de Mayo was novel to them. All we needed was an excuse to drink margaritas and we were on our way! By the time I got to North Carolina for grad school the holiday had gone mainstream. I couldn’t help but be a little bit proud, like when salsa surpassed ketchup as America’s number one condiment. Imagine my joy when I learned that the 2005 annual meeting of SANA and CASCA would be held at UADY in Merida over Cinco de Mayo. AMAZEBALLS!! Spend Cinco de Mayo in Mexico? Hells to the yeah!

It turns out Mexicans don’t really give a shit about Cinco de Mayo.

I did host a party. All my peops from SANA were there. I have photos of people wearing hats that they shouldn’t be wearing. But this is not the place for that, now is it? Yet even though the party was a success, even though that moment of negotiating an enormous bar tab is probably the crowning achievement of my use of the Spanish language, I was still secretly disappointed because that’s when I learned that Cinco de Mayo is actually an American holiday. Sure, its important in Puebla where the historic battle was actually fought but otherwise its mostly a tourist thing.

As an American holiday Cinco de Mayo is doing some important work bringing Hispanics greater visibility, negotiating their acculturation into mainstream pop culture, and selling a lot of Corona beer and tacky t-shirts. In these respects its somewhat similar to St. Patrick’s Day.

Now I realize that St. Patrick’s Day is a global holiday and that it holds a sacred place on some religious calendars. What I’m talking about here is the way the holiday is typically observed in the United States, either as a moment of ethnic pride or an excuse to drink Guinness and Jameson. There is of course the unfortunate stereotype of the Irish drunk and all those decades the Irish spent on the bottom rung of acceptable society, but hey, let’s not bring that up tonight. Tonight we’re going to have fun!

Similarly Cinco de Mayo is both a commemoration of the past and a strategic forgetting.

The time when the Irish were despised as the lowest of the low has long since passed. Through generations of acculturation and through marking the boundaries of Black racial difference the Irish became White to paraphrase Noel Ignatiev. St Patrick’s Day helps us put that old history to rest through a healing application of mass quantities of alcohol, Kiss Me I’m Irish t-shirts, and bright green Dollar Store disposable fun. This is perhaps because taking a too sour view of history flies in the face of the whole light-hearted spirit of the holiday.

You don’t even have to be Irish to celebrate it! No one will be checking your ethnic ID at the door, so put on your leprechaun hat and toss back another car bomb. Even if you’re just being ironic playing at ethnicity is part of the fun and makes difference seem less threatening.

Cinco de Mayo does this too.

As a springtime holiday nestled between Easter and Mother’s Day, Cinco de Mayo heralds the coming of summer, the end of the college semester, and the promise of tourist friendly beaches or at least friendly waiters at your local Mexican restaurant. Unlike religious holidays (Easter, Passover), national holidays (4th of July, Thanksgiving), or Hallmark Holidays (Mother’s and Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day), Cinco de Mayo like St Patrick’s Day, New Years Eve, and Halloween is decidedly a “fun” holiday; four days that all offer us a license to behave in ways we wouldn’t ordinarily and to consume ritualized foods and beverages.

Both Cinco de Mayo and St Patrick’s are highly commodified. I think this says something about the way in which one may claim ethnic identity in the United States. If you’re going to be a hyphenated American then you’re going to have to buy something. American capitalism vets ethnic minorities through a ritual of consumerism. What’s interesting is that even if you’re an unhyphenated American then you’re going to buy something too. Maybe that’s where we can find our common ground? In the seasonal aisle at Wal-mart.

Arlene Davila writes about this in Latinos, Inc. Part of claiming a Latino identity in the United States is buying certain products, watching certain TV shows, and being the subject of targeted advertising. Through Goya products, Univision, and imported beers Latinos consume commodified representations of themselves. I think Cinco de Mayo is part of this too. Its a marketing ploy really, to get people to spend their money at restaurants and buy alcohol. But what might be the long term consequences of this holiday for the next generation of Latinos coming to understand their place in America?

Mexicans occupy a political and cultural space similar to the historic Irish prior to their admission into mainstream acceptable society. If the moral panic surrounding their immigration to the US is to be believed then they are truly despicable. The perceived threat is manifold. They hold our laws in contempt, they steal our jobs, they’re a threat to our youth, they refuse to speak English, they refuse to adopt American culture, and the young men form gangs. Oh yeah, and they’re brown. Never mind that some of them are literally putting the food on our tables (see Ann Aurelia Lopez’s brilliant The Farmworker’s Journey and the produce section of your grocery store will never look the same).

Arguably what the Irish faced was even more horrible than what Latinos have to deal with now. Time will tell whether they are capable of undergoing a similar racializing transformation and whether it will take place via the continued subordination of Blacks as it was for the Irish. I’m quite optimistic really, for once neoliberalism might truly come to the rescue. After all, there’s a whole hell of a lot of us. And if there’s anything capitalism likes its a market. Money talks and now its speaking Spanish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• How the categories of “homeless in America” and “empowered abroad” are constructed /via @evgenymorozov /KF
• RT @daniel_lende: Hot Find! Humans Used Fire 1 Million Years Ago /KF
• 20 Services Google Thinks Are More Important Than Google Scholar /kf
• The Anthropology of Searching for Aliens /KF
• Cultural Anthro Hot Spot: Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet Co-edited by @CMcGranahan and @BeijingNomad /KF
• US Anthropologist in Mali http://bit.ly/IKNusS Becomes Sought-After Blogger /KF /via @OccupAnthro
• We don’t do Calls for Papers on Savage Minds, but you can check out http://Conferencealerts.com /kf
• The Last Enclosures. @swarthmoreburke on “professors only work 15 hours a week” /KF
• Having an abortion in 1978: “I’m pregnant but I’m not trapped… I don’t have to be ashamed or terrified” //MT
• This is SO true. Gender and intensifying modifiers in speech. //MT
• Protecting democracy and fighting global climate change go hand in hand in the Maldives. //MT
• How will robot prostitutes change the global sex tourism industry? //MT
• Watch a Mongolian family erect their ger in fast forward. //MT
• Let’s go on a road trip… through rural Mongolia! //MT
• American Anthropological Association 2012 Elections – Candidates on Open Access /KF
• Swedish Minister in ‘racist circumcision outrage’ /KF
• “Hopefully” this is the end of it. Prescriptive vs. descriptive worldviews in English dictionaries. //MT
• RT @Awl: How Not to Kiss in Paris /KF
• What is an old card catalog good for anyways? Art! //MT
• Hmm… is this a metaphor for something? Luxury cruise ship passes boat in distress w/o stopping. Two die. //MT
• Shailja Patel: The missing ingredient in Sweden’s racist-misogynist cake /via @zunguzungu /KF
• [PDF] Review Essay: RACE: Are We So Different? (Review of AAA exhibition on race.) /KF
• Know your Middle East memes: a guide by @jilliancyork /kf
• Some notes on the universality of art; evolution from a philosopher’s standpoint. //MT
• Spring cleaning this season? Throw away your grades. //MT
• The Worrying Consequences of the Wikipedia Gender Gap /via @zunguzungu /KF
• Video game designed to treat mild depression in teens found to be as effective as counseling. //MT
• U Florida eliminates Computer Science dept, athletics budget grows +2%. //MT
• Young Americans are less likely to own a car. Is this generational or an artifact of debt and a poor economy? //MT
• Harvard Library to faculty: we’re going broke unless you go open access /KF
• On using Pinterest to teach feminism. //MT
• North Carolina proposes to make cash reparations to remaining survivors of state eugenics program. //MT
• The Internet’s broken promises and online culture in Ghana. //MT
• Anthropologist Julian Brash’s “Bloomberg’s New York” is Village Voice’s 2011 best overlooked NY book. //MT
• RT @M_ONeal: Issue 4 « Anthropology of this Century /KF

First of all, I’ll admit that I was pretty spoiled during the first few months of fieldwork because I had WIRELESS INTERNET access anytime I wanted.  That’s right, a wireless connection right in my room.  Madness, I know.  This was definitely not the case when I was here in 2009 and 2010 doing prelim work for my dissertation.  I had no problems with my fantastic and luxurious internet situation…until it evaporated like spilled gasoline.

Gone.

For the last month the internet has once again become a rare, fleeting occurrence that is only attainable (it seems) when the wind blows in the right direction.  You can’t always get what you want.  The funny thing is that once something like the internet comes into a place, certain technologically-skilled folks (like the local satellite internet tech) become high demand individuals–and almost impossible to find.  The internet is wonderful, amazing, and very useful…until it breaks and there’s nobody to fix it.  So anyway, my extended vacation from Savage Minds has a little something to do with the sudden loss of signal syndrome (SLSS)…but the truth is that this might not be a bad thing considering the fact that I am in the middle of fieldwork.

Still, having internet for fieldwork can be really beneficial, especially in my case.  Why?  Because many of the residents of this area use the internet to communicate with one another instead of telephones (and sometimes instead of walking over and tapping on a neighbor’s door)*.  So it helps to be connected into this network in order to keep a certain level of communication going.  It also helps to have internet when I need to try to set up meetings in places that are 1-2 hour drives away, since there’ nothing worse than making a long, dusty drive to find out that the official you wanted to talk with is away for two weeks on vacation.

At the same time, internet access in the middle of fieldwork can be a time-sucking curse (I’m sure many of you know what I mean).  In the old days I think a lot of cultural anthropologists used to wile away the hours and fieldwork anxieties by reading massive books.  This is still pretty common.  But what about now?  Are future generations of anthropologists going to deal with culture and fieldwork shock by playing solitaire or Angry Birds?

There are lots of conversations out there about how the internet is going to affect fieldwork.  In my case, it’s both a positive and a very negative thing all at once.  It’s useful to have, just like anywhere, but it’s also not really a good idea to depend upon the internet.  Why?  Because when it isn’t there, and your research methods are counting on it to make connections, then what?  Well, that’s where flexibility comes into the picture.  If there’s one thing that we all need in fieldwork, it’s the ability to adjust what we’re doing to the situation at hand.

I’ll go ahead and admit that I may have been counting a little too much on having internet access to get in touch with certain people in the communities where I am working.  I planned on using it as one of my recruitment tool, mostly after I learned how important it was for many community members down here and how often they use it.  And when the net is on and accessible, it works great for getting in touch with people, setting up meetings, and even arranging times to meet for interviews.  But when it goes out, it’s like getting stuck on top of some massive roller coaster…the whole system got you this far, but now you’re stuck.  Now what?  Well, this isn’t exactly a new problem in anthropology.  Veronica, my wife, who is also a cultural anthropology grad student, always reminds me about the fact that old Bronislaw Malinowski used a pretty simple yet effective anthropological method when he needed to learn what was going on: he went for walks.

He went for lots of walks.

So there you have it.  If your research design counts upon having access to high-speed (or even excruciatingly slow speed) internet, here’s my advice: don’t count on it.  This is not just advice for field sites in places where the internet is a relatively new luxury.  This applies everywhere: haven’t you ever experienced a day or two when the net goes down at your university of office and the whole world seems to freeze and nobody knows what do to?  Ya, it’s the same thing…kinda like when the power goes out and then everyone realizes that maybe having candles, water, and flashlights would be a good idea.  So, the lesson of the story (and I am learning this myself) is to find the fieldwork version of candles and flashlights for when the communicative power known as the internet flickers into nothingness.  Two feet, motivation, and a decent little notebook can still go a long way in the 21st century.**

So, there you have it: keep on walking, people.

Over and out.  I’ll write when I can.

*In fact, where I am working, there are many people who PREFER to be contacted via email, since that’s what they use for all kinds of social planning.  So, another issue here is that we might have to face the fact that our preferred methods of meeting and recruiting interview participants might not always be available, so we have to adjust accordingly.

** Repeat this mantra as necessary if you are an intractable online junkie/fieldworker.

As described in my last post, listening to lots of audio in the target language is a key part of my approach to language learning. For that reason I needed a good field recorder app for my iPhone. I spent a lot of time and (because you can’t demo most apps without buying them) money searching for a workflow which would let me record, edit, and listen to audio within the same application. I wanted it all in one application because I find that I sometimes want to go back and re-edit a file. It is also currently difficult to send files to iTunes without going through the desktop. In the end, I found a wonderful app that did exactly what I wanted: FiRe2 Field Recorder.

FiRe2 has some really great features that I find particularly useful. First of all, it shows a waveform of the audio. When you are trying to edit an audio file, or listen to it for language practice, having a visual representation of the audio is very useful. Secondly, you can easily mark the audio during recording or playback for easy navigation or editing. While I found other waveform editors, none were as easy to use for playback and language practice. In FiRe2 it is very easy to jump back to the previous mark or the beginning of an audio file with the tap of your thumb. Third, it is easy to sync the audio to the desktop in a number of formats via Dropbox. Forth and most importantly, if you turn the phone sideways it gives you an intuitive and easy to use waveform editor which allows me to easily extract the bits of speech I want to listen to for my language practice.

Of course, FiRe isn’t perfect. I wish it was easier to edit and see text labels for the markers. But FiRe is not meant to be used for transcription. In another post I will talk about transcription software – an essential part of my language learning workflow. I also wish it supported the “open in” feature of iOS which allows apps to send and receive files from other apps. (They say they are working on it.) I should also add that while I find the built-in microphone is good enough for my needs, there are a number of external mics you can buy if you need better sound quality.

Doing a ‘literature’ review, then, basically means creating a series of dossiers of the scholars with whom you will be interacting. The more creepily complete, the better.

A lot of times you will know who to Google first because you have at least some clue of who is who in your field. Those of you attending schools with high levels of cultural capital have probably met them already. If worse to worse your advisor can throw out a few names: “Why haven’t you read, oh you know, X, Y and Z”? After you get the a few leads, this is what you do:

Get a CV: The best way to get a CV or list of publications is, imho, to google “[name of professor] department” or “[name of prof] professor department”. Googling for ‘CV’ will get you the CVs of everyone whose committee your prof was on. Googling ‘anthropology’ won’t work because often these people aren’t in anthropology departments. Sometimes ‘professor’ won’t work for non-US schools because they might be ‘senior lecturers’ or something like that.

Download Orgy: download every article and publication, conference paper and report. Often the shorter informal pieces are better because they get to the point quickly and give you a sense of the person. This phase is enjoyable because you have the illusion of making progress merely by right-clicking. Find everything. The more obscure the better. Never give up, never surrender.

File your articles: don’t let them pile up in the downloads folder — get them all in your bibliography or note-taking program with as much decent metadata as you can manage.

Read the acknowledgements of their dissertation, and maybe the first chapter: People thank their advisors. Once you know where they come from you know where they are going. If you do this enough after a while you will start to sense the names of the people — and the places, department culture is very important — who influenced them.

Look at the big picture: At this point you should have a good sense of where institutionally they’ve taught and been taught. You know their topic and main intellectual preoccupation. With their works all arranged chronologically in Zotero you can see patterns start to emerge: their dissertation, the article summarizing their dissertation that they published when they were on the market, the book of the dissertation they published to get tenure, the crazy project on Goth Fashion they began once they got tenure because they wanted to study something ‘fun’. Just having a chronology of their work already tells you most of what you need to know about them.

Read selectively: Now you have a sense of who this person is and how they are related to you. Is this going to be your main ally or opponent in your dissertation? If so, then you should read very very closely. It may turn out they are related but tangential to your project. In this case a brief look at the abstracts of a couple of articles should be ok — you can always come back to this person’s dossier later now that you have it in place. For most scholars you will be somewhere in-between, and choosing how deeply to engage is itself a statement of who you are as a person.

Bibliography Crawl: read the bibliography of that person’s articles and look for people who are cited repeatedly, or with great vehemence. These are the next links in the chain — start compiling a dossier on them.

An article a day: once you’ve sussed out someone, then you can always return to their work in the course of your normal article-a-day reading.

Check for Updates Manually: The key to the literature is to keep up to date. Once someone is on your radar look out for new work by them, and occasionally Google Scholar them to make sure that you are up to date. Reading the newest latest really does matter for the relevance of your project to granting agencies, and it’s deeply ingratiating to your fellow scholars to be told at a conference that you’ve read their newest paper. The goal is to get them to say “Really? I didn’t even know that was out yet.”

The thing about this method is that you have to do it and do it and do it. After a while your sense of the network will grow to the point that your dossier-gathering will be finished almost as soon as it starts: “Oh, someone at X studying with Y on Z? Well I guess I know what they’re up to.” Additionally, because dossier-gathering can be done in about the time it takes to read an article, it can actually be done quite quickly and as a result you get a sense of the network and it’s alignments — and by the time you have that sort of big-picture view, then honing in on the nodes is almost an after-thought. This method can be done even if you have limited access to Closed Access databases because even the most sinister Big Content publisher will give up an abstract for free. Sometimes, just the citation is all you need for big-picture purposes. And frankly, for a lot of the more decorative and scene-setting citations you do in theses and grant applications, the one-sentence overview is all you really need, but you need like fifty of them. So go forth and get mapping!